HORIZONS
Norman Bel Geddes
Norman Bel Geddes: HORIZONS. Boston: Little, Brown 1932. First edition. A near-fine hardcover book with decorated cloth and missing the dust jacket. The silver toning of the cloth is dulled in a few spots and there is light wear to the edges. A very nice copy of this legendary early treatise on streamlining. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print, and needless to say-- somewhat rare.
8 x 10.5 hardcover book with 294 pages and 215 b/w photographs, diagrams, illustrations and plans of theatre designs, commercial design, architectural projects, and general social concepts. First edition of Bel Geddes' stunning survey of modernist design, illustrated throughout with drawings, models and photographs of the author's utopic industrial innovation with chapters on motor cars and buses, railways, airports and airplanes, houses, theatres, restaurants, and more. Photographers include Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, Ralph Steiner and Francis Brugiere.
Contents:
- towards design
- speed--tomorrow
- motor cars and buses
- railways
- by air tomorrow
- new houses for old
- industrializing the theatre
- architecture for the amusement industry
- restaurant architecture
- what price factory ugliness?
- product design as approached
- unexplored fields for the designer
- in window display the play's the thing
- changing world
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 World's 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.
out of stock