PENCIL POINTS
January 1937
Norman Bel Geddes: Master of Design

Kenneth Reid (editor): PENCIL POINTS. Stanford: Reinhold Publishing Co., 1937. Volume 18, Number 1, January 1937. Original Edition. A very good vintage magazine with mild spine wear, and a couple of rubbed spots on the cover. Interior unmarked and very clean. Cover design and typography by Norman Bel Geddes (uncredited).

8.75 x 11.75 original magazine with 100 pages of vintage content and advertising. This edition of Pencil Points is noteworthy for its feature article: Norman Bel Geddes: Master of Design by Kenneth Reid. 32 pages and 51 b/w images cover all aspects of Bel Geddes career upto 1937 including automobile and transportation design, consumer industrial design, set design, city planning, furniture, architecture and more. An early, very high profile look at one of the giants of American industrial Design. Highly recommended.

As if the Bel Geddes feature wasn't enough, there is also an illustrated article on Corner Window Treatments, with work examples by George Howe, Robert Weed, Robert Davison, A. Lawrence Kocher, Hugh Stubbins and others. There are also an excellent assortment of vintage trade advertisments that espouse the depression moderne streamline aesthetic quite nicely. You have been warned.

An American theatrical and industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes was the first person to seriously apply the concepts of aerodynamics and streamlining to industrial design. To Geddes, streamlining illustrated courage: "We are too much inclined to believe, because things have long been done a certain way, that that is the best way to do them. Following old grooves of thought is one method of playing safe. But it deprives one of initiative and takes too long. It sacrifices the value of the element of surprise. At times, the only thing to do is to cut loose and do the unexpected! It takes more even than imagination to be progressive. It takes vision and courage. "

In 1927, Bel Geddes left theatrical design and began designing cars, ships, factories and railways. He rapidly created streamlined forms for objects ranging from gas-ranges to trains, in addition to a revolving restaurant and, in 1929, a 9-deck amphibian airliner that incorporated areas for deck-games, an orchestra, a fully equipped gymnasium and a solarium.

Bel Geddes designed the famous General Motors Pavilion for the1939 New York Worldıs Fair, which included the Highway and Horizons exhibit, more commonly known as the "Futurama".

Bel Geddes expounded a philosophy of "essential forms" evolved from their systems of use, in his seminal book Horizons, published in 1932. He helped to establish a new professional niche -- that of "industrial designer", arguing for a closer relationship between engineering and design.

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