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A recent exhibition traces the roots of American industrial design back to Toledo.
By Peter Hall
July 2002
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Above: The Toledo #6 metal press was used for the mass production of
products like the bicycle in the background. Below: Jeeps lined up
behind streamlined toy vehicles.
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Photo by Dave Lehman
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When the French government invited secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover
to send examples of good American design for an exposition in Paris in 1925,
he declined, saying that the United States didn't have any. Less than a
decade later, good design was a fad sweeping the nation. In February 1934
Fortune magazine celebrated the new profession of the industrial
designer, profiling ten of its "typical" practitioners--including
Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes--whose work had emerged
as a means to lift sales during the Depression. "The product had to
be made to sell itself. Designers were called in," ran the editorial,
adding that "industrial design is here to stay in a number of industries
that knew it not before."
The erudite exhibition The Alliance of Art and Industry: Toledo Designs
for a Modern America pins this well-known story of the birth of a profession
to a specific point on the map: the oft maligned Ohio city of Toledo.
Unholy Toledo, it turns out, was a cornerstone in the foundation of manufacturer-designer
arrangements, and a pioneer in America's marriage of form and function for
mass production. If that sounds like a self-serving premise for a show conceived
by the Toledo Museum of Art, indeed it is. But it makes for an informative
thesis that is persuasively, if somewhat inconclusively, argued.
From the end of the nineteenth century, according to Timothy Messer-Kruse's
essay in the show's hefty 234-page catalog, Toledo was a manufacturing boomtown
with a particular aptitude for innovative sales techniques and advertising
practices. In the 1920s local merchants were among the first to employ
designers. DeVilbiss, a maker of spray atomizers, hired chief designer Frederic
Vuillemenot, a graduate of the École des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris, as early as 1924. By 1933 Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Donald
Deskey had all been hired to design and consult for Toledo manufacturers.
"While corporate America still waited to be sold on the idea of hiring
expensive consultants to redesign their products," Messer-Kruse writes,
"corporate Toledo employed an impressive roster of pioneer designers."
The result was an extraordinary array of familiar products, which populate
this exhibition like old friends, awaiting visitors' delighted squeals of
"I used to have one of those!" There's the Zeroll ice-cream scoop,
created and produced in Toledo by inventor Sherman Kelly in 1935, its one-piece
aluminum design filled with defrosting liquid developed to transfer
heat from the user's hand to soften stubborn ices. Then there is the Maytag
washing machine of 1939, its white enamel casing (to hide the motor and
hoses) so successful that it sold unchanged for 44 years. And there's the
military Jeep, developed jointly by Ford and Toledo-based Willys-Overland
Motors in 1941 to meet a U.S. Army request for a transport vehicle to replace
the horse.
The exhibition posits the theory that a particular kind of no-frills industrial-design
aesthetic prevailed in the Midwest, tempered by a sense of moderation quite
distinct from the flamboyant styles developed on the East Coast. Its
leading light was Toledo's Harold Van Doren, whose work--including the aforementioned
Maytag--had a "simple solidity," according to catalog essayist
Jeffrey L. Meikle. While the East Coasters (Loewy, Dreyfuss, et al.) were
designing showy exposition pavilions for the 1939 World's Fair, Van Doren
was populating America with products like gas pumps for the Wayne Pump Company,
refrigerators for Philco, and stoves for Westinghouse. The Toledo Museum
of Art itself--founded in 1901 by Edward Drummond Libbey, the man behind
the town's huge glass-manufacturing interests--played an important role
by holding classes to introduce artisans and manufacturers to art and establishing
a design school as early as 1918. Engineers and craftsmen emerged with products
like the ubiquitous Governor Clinton glass tumbler, with a distinctive corrugated
shape designed for strength rather than fashion.
Design history shows are often dull and a little reminiscent of huge rummage
sales. So for something different, the exhibition's curators wisely brought
in New York-based designer Constantin Boym, whose studio specializes
in a conceptual approach to exhibition design. Boym treated each gallery
like a stage set, using simple props and giant cartoonlike graphics to create
metaphors that provide context and reinforcement for the themes. The opening
gallery, for example, makes reference to the idea of a construction site,
with a large T made of scaffolding that resembles a crane, from which
is hung a flat-screen monitor playing a midcentury promotional film
for industry. A graph-paper laminate appears throughout as both a backdrop
for graphics and a tabletop pattern. The effect is quite unusual.
Toledo Designs exhibits about 180 products, including six vehicles,
spread across a dozen or so galleries to create an overall impression of
sparseness quite different from the lush, densely populated displays of
the recent Mood River design show at the Wexner Center for the Arts,
in Columbus, Ohio. If these are stage sets, they're of the minimal theater
of the absurd kind: objects positioned in asymmetrical combinations like
readymades in a Dada play. At times the museum's parquet floor diminishes
the effect, and the show seems rather bare. At its best the exhibition design
provides a gently ironic commentary on the proceedings; for example, in
the transportation room the Jeep and two of its descendants--the Jeep Station
Wagon and the Cherokee Sport Utility Vehicle--are counterposed with the
children's wheeled toys of the 1930s developed by Van Doren and John Rideout
for the American National Company. The teardrop-shaped fenders and curvaceous
forms of the Skippy Scooter, Tot Bike, Line Racer, and Streamlined Velocipede
parade in an opposite direction to the jeeps, like a parody of the adult
world of vehicles.
Boym's treatments also highlight the surprising absence of critical commentary
in the show. The point missing from the transportation gallery is that the
SUV is arguably one of industrial design's most shameful products: a gas-guzzling,
polluting monster. It has been 30 years since Victor Papanek wrote Design
for the Real World with the opening words, "There are professions
more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them." Yet
the curatorial position of Toledo Designs is confined to nostalgic
adulation. Industrial design may have boosted the economy by stimulating
sales during the Depression, but it also helped trigger the consumer feeding
frenzy whose environmental and social consequences we are just beginning
to feel. Designers incorporated obsolescence to ensure a constant flow
of cars, appliances, electronics, and printer cartridges to the waste stream.
The absence of contemporary commentary--beyond the ironic stage sets--means
that the show ends up raising more questions than it answers. The final
gallery, called "Toledo Tomorrow," is devoted to various utopian
city-planning schemes, including one dreamed up by Bel Geddes for the Toledo
Blade newspaper. It becomes a missed opportunity for the curators to
address the question of what did happen to the city. Bel Geddes envisioned
a metropolis sliced up by highways, with a central transportation hub for
air, train, and bus passengers. The effect of such utopian thinking was
to create the highway-dissected, fractured sprawl that defines today's
American city. Toledo has recovered somewhat from the suburban flight
and economic decline that hit the Rust Belt in the 1970s and '80s, but it
still exhibits all the problems facing towns rebuilt for the auto age. These
days the Blade is reporting a low manufacturing index, a high vacancy
rate for industrial buildings, and skyrocketing bankruptcy filings.
But if design--or lack of it--contributed to problems of the modern-day
Midwestern city, then it can also resolve them. As it stands, Toledo
Designs ends with a shrug. Meikle concludes his essay on the emergence
of a Midwestern design aesthetic by noting that in the 1960s many designers
went in-house, and in the 1980s and '90s they moved out of the cities into
the suburbs or rural environments: "Midwestern design ceased to exist."
But with the disappearance of regional aesthetics has come a convergence
of disciplines, heralding the age of the designer who can address a more
far-reaching goal than improving sales by routinely tweaking an object's
appearance.
One can only hope that the scholarly and curatorial resources poured into
this show, which was five years in the making, might now be applied
to the sequel that is begging to happen: How can design help Toledo today?
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