MODERN LIVING: Up from the Egg

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In his Manhattan apartment early one morning last week, Industrial Designer Raymond Loewy awoke with a start. As he flipped a bedside switch, soft indirect light spread over walls made of egg-crate fiber and over a group of improbable furnishings− a Tahitian drum, Congo ceremonial sword, Chinese helmet, Moroccan fly-switch, Senegalese war hatchet and grotesque Zulu masks. Loewy, who gets some of his best ideas in bed (and no nightmares from the masks), reached for the ever-present memo pad beside his pillow and scribbled a cryptic note: Why not a suction cap for shaving-cream tubes?

The idea captured, frail as it was, Loewy went back to sleep until a Loewy-designed alarm clock tinkled at 7 a.m., turning him out into a world filled with the products of his night & day dreaming. In his black, beige and bronze bathroom, with its motif of Nubian slaves, he plugged in his Loewy-designed Schick electric razor, used a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste he had modeled for Pepsodent, tore off the wrapper he had designed for Lux soap. Even the expensively tailored grey suit he put on was his own snugly fitting creation. Its special feature: inch-and-a-half cuffs on the sleeves, which could be replaced when frayed (a designer’s fray quickly).

In the combination living & dining room, glittering with thousands of flecks of gold-colored plastic thread woven in chairs, sofa and carpet, the huge mirror forming the far wall parted; through it, from her hidden boudoir, stepped Viola Loewy, his 28-year-old bride of less than a year, to join him at breakfast.

After eating, Loewy descended ten floors to his spanking new 1950 Studebaker convertible waiting at the curb. That he had designed too—along with all the Studebakers since the war—and thereby helped set a new fashion in automobiles. Loewy’s own car had a few special flamboyant frills: a plastic tailfin, a tiny gold grilled air scoop above the emblem on the hood, recessed door handles, porthole windows and other eyecatchers to start pedestrians’ tongues awagging with-the name of Studebaker− and Showman Loewy.

Man at Work. Loewy and his 143 designers, architects and draftsmen were busier than ever spreading that name & fame on a dozen new projects. They had signed up to modernize Raglands department store on Texas’ famed King Ranch (TIME, Dec. 15, 1947); they had just completed the first part of a face-lifting for Manhattan’s Gimbel Brothers (cried Gimbels in full-page ads: “We are speechless”). Their new two-level Greyhound bus (the Scenicruiser) was being road-tested on Michigan roads. For California they were planning a state fair.

Hardly had Loewy stepped into his muted grey and beige penthouse office high above Fifth Avenue, when more jobs rolled in, e.g., a television maker wanted him to draw up sketches for a new line of cabinets. “Fine,” said Loewy. “I spent $2,000 on my own set and it hasn’t worked right since I bought it.” From Glamour magazine came a phone call: How about an article on theater design? “Wonderful,” said Loewy. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to tell everyone what’s wrong with theaters.” Then Loewy paced nervously through the various cubicles where his associates were planning new designs for everything from tiepins to locomotives.

He looked over models of the interiors of three new ocean liners for American President Lines, hurried on to pick up a new bottle for Lever Bros. Loewy thought it would be nice to put some kind of shock absorber on the bottom (“The clash of glass against a sink isn’t good”). From his pocket he whipped out his hasty design for the tube-top made as a suction cup (to hold the tube against the wall while in use). “Make one up and I’ll try it at home for a week or two,” he said.

Loewy stopped to look ruefully at the flat lettering on a new ice-cream package. “It’s for home freezer units,” he protested, “where there isn’t much light. The brand name has to jump right out at you.” Grabbing scissors and glossy, colored paper, he snipped out a design, slapped the brand lettering against it and held it up: the name jumped out, all right.

Designer Loewy, who likes good food, but likes a trim figure better (he keeps his weight close to 170 by diet and massage), worked on through the lunch hour, pausing only for an apple and saccharin-sweetened coffee. Then, in & out of workrooms again, he stopped by a drafting board littered with new tiepin designs, picked up a pencil and drew an arrowhead and part of the shaft. “Work some up like this in gold, or black−or maybe burgundy,” he said in the tone of a suggestion. “Men seem to like burgundy.” At the blueprints for a power-wheel for bicycles for the American Brake Shoe Co., Loewy commented: “Much too heavy.” On his way out he stumbled over some outdoor cooking grills that a new customer had brought in for redesign. Looking at the clumsy grills with ill-concealed horror, he murmured: “Terrible! Terrible!” and rushed off for a rubdown and massage at the New York Athletic Club. The Sleeping Beauty. As the biggest industrial designer in the U.S., Raymond Fernand Loewy, at 56, is the dominant figure in a field which in less than a quarter-century has mushroomed from a groping, uncertain experiment into a major phenomenon of U.S. business. Design has existed since man made the first wheel, but the Machine Age, concerned at first only with spewing forth its myriad products in increasing quantity, was slow in discovering the need for form. As early as 1904 Frank Lloyd Wright was singing the beauties of the machine. As he later put it:

Now, a chair is a machine to sit in.

A home is a machine to live in.

The human body is a machine to be

worked by will.

A tree is a machine to bear fruit. A plant is a machine to bear flowers

and seeds. And . . . a heart is a suction-pump.

Does that idea thrill you?

Not until the late ‘203 did Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes−industrial design’s greatest prophet and visionary−and a handful of pioneers, including Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, Harold Van Doren, Lurelle Guild, thrill the industrial world with an art for the Machine Age.

They pursued the simple principle that every object can have an ideal form which, with economy and grace, can express its function. Through centuries of trial & error many of man’s simplest tools −the ax helve, the plowshare, the ox yoke −had achieved a utilitarian perfection of design. In essence, industrial design was a brave attempt to bring the same simplicity to all the goods and tools of modern living. The depression, when industrialists were willing to try anything to boost sales, gave the designers their first big chance to show what they could do.

The Lusty Child. There were early flops, but the flops were soon outnumbered by notable successes. Trim, clean-lined stoves, oil heaters, refrigerators and washing machines outsold their ugly predecessors and those of competitors. Streamlining, which had the laudable purpose of cutting down wind resistance in trains, cars, etc., became such a craze that it was even inflicted on such static objects as desk sets. Little by little the hardy, struggling band proved that their artistry could draw that prettiest curve of all to businessmen−an upward-sweeping sales curve.

Today, the infant art of industrial design is fast becoming as potent a sales force as advertising. Many big companies, like General Motors, General Electric and Westinghouse, have long since built up design departments of their own, but smaller companies, who cannot afford to do so, must depend exclusively on freelance specialists like Loewy.

With the return of the buyer’s market, every U.S. manufacturer is cudgeling his brain−and the brains of designers−to make his product work better, feel better, look better and sell better than those of his rivals. This year U.S. business will spend some $500 million improving the way its products look. Of that sum, Raymond Loewy Associates expects to collect $3,000,000, the biggest gross ever. And Loewy expects that his personal income, which has averaged $200,000 for the past five years, will be boosted also.

The Shy Salesman. Suave, grey-haired, medium-sized (5 ft. 10 in.), Loewy talks in a subdued voice that is, at the same time, apologetic and compelling. His face is reposed, gentle, sad, and as inscrutable as that of a Monte Carlo croupier. Obsessively shy, he is always “Mr. Loewy” even to his longtime associates. Even to those who know him well he is something of an enigma. Said one longtime acquaintance: “After all these years, I’m not even sure that I like him!” Everything he does calls attention,-with skilled showmanship, to his work, so that observers at times get the strange feeling that he too is a design−by Loewy, of course.

Despite his shyness, he is a crack salesman who throws no artistic tantrums. Far from turning out designs with offhand sureness, he works them over painstakingly until the client is satisfied. He also has an almost hypnotic power to impress, persuade and convince the toughest tycoon. Even the American Tobacco Co.’s late George Washington Hill, who used to frighten advertising men out of their wits, wilted under Loewy’s gentle suasion. He paid him the whopping fee of $50,000 just for designing a new white package for Lucky Strike in 1942 (“Lucky Strike green has gone to war”).

Eggs & Needles. Loewy’s business has grown so large that he now has three working partners: A. Baker Barnhart, who has charge of all packaging, product and transportation design; William Snaith, who manages all department-store work; Business Manager John Breen. There are branch offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, South Bend, Ind. and London. All of his designers think so much like him that, says an admiring rival, “If you meet any one of them you meet Loewy.”

Says the boss, who takes on jobs for as little as $500 or as much as $200,000: “If you want me to do a big thing like a tractor—there are so many obvious things you could do to make it better-looking that I would take it for very little. But if you want me to redesign a sewing needle, I’d charge $100,000. After all, how can you improve a needle? It’s like the perfect functional shape of an egg.”

As the “great packager” who tricks up boxes and labels, Designer Loewy lures U.S. consumers into buying more soap, lard, perfume and hair oils. If he did nothing more than such trivial things, consumers might well wonder what benefit, if any, they get from his work. But he also works just as hard making all manner of things better and more usable. His new vacuum cleaner (Singer) is the first which is designed to be hung up flat against a closet wall. Foley Bros, department store, in Houston, was the first department store designed so that a shopper could walk through the store making purchases, and have them all waiting for her when she returned to her car in the store garage. Though Loewy’s work does not have the imaginative sweep of Designer Bel Geddes’ visions of triple-decked planes, rotary airports and submarinelike ocean liners, he has a greater influence on current design and modern living than any other designer simply because his pen is in so many different inkpots.

Chain Reaction. A small problem often leads to much bigger ones. For example, the job of streamlining International Harvester’s tractors led to designing a distinctive new building (1,125 have been built) in which to sell them (see cut).

Loewy’s first job for the Pennsylvania Railroad was designing a trash can. That was successful, so he went to work blueprinting a new locomotive. To find out what was wrong with old engines, Loewy rode them for thousands of miles, noting such things as the absence of a toilet for the crew (he installed one), and the fact that smoke sometimes obscured, the engineer’s vision (he devised a vane to deflect it). He wound up designing not only new locomotives but whole new trains for Pennsylvania (Broadway Limited, “Spirit of St. Louis,” The General, Liberty Limited, etc.), and modern new stations as well. Now he is pondering the biggest problem of all: finding a better and more profitable way to handle all the road’s freight.

His methods often mystify clients. When Chicago’s Armour & Co. hired Loewy to redesign and repackage its 700-800 different products, he disappeared for about six months. Said Vice President Walter S. Shafer: “We didn’t know what he was doing.” Actually, Loewymen were out talking to hundreds of housewives who bought the products. When Loewy came back he told Armour to abolish all the multicolor labels that it had been using, and substitute a simple two-color pattern throughout. Armour saved enough money on color-printing alone to pay for the designer’s services. As Lever Bros.’ Charles Luckman, another client, put it: “Raymond keeps one eye on imagination and one eye on the cash register.”

Flash of a Knife. In 1943 when he began designing the first postwar Studebaker, Loewy decided that current cars were too bulky, too laden with chromium “spinach and schmalz,” and had too many blind spots for the driver. What he wanted was slimness, grace and better visibility. To his staff he mapped the grand strategy: “Weight is the enemy . . . Whatever saves weight saves cost. The car must look fast, whether in motion or stationary. I want it to look as if it were leaping forward; I want ‘built-in’ motion … If it looks ‘stopped’ it is a dead pigeon … I want one that looks alive as a leaping greyhound.”

He augmented his permanent staff in the Studebaker plant from 28 to 39, talked each design over with engineers to see if it was feasible. From hundreds of tentative designs Loewy pulled a curve here, a hood there, a fender sweep yonder, then “mocked up” about a dozen experimental models in clay, one-quarter size, and worked on them. Says Studebaker’s President Harold S. Vance: “I have seen Loewy shake his head in disapproval, then take out a knife and with one sweep correct the clay model to perfection.”

When the final model was chosen and mocked up full-size, Loewy called in Studebaker officials and dramatically whisked the coverings off the model. Loewy feels that “it is the first impression that counts; either it clicks or it doesn’t.”

It clicked so well that in the last three years Studebaker has broken all its peacetime records for sales and profits. Not all Studebaker dealers liked the 1950 models which came out last August. Some did not like the rocketlike hood and nose air intake that resembles the 1949 Ford. But Loewy’s answer is in the sales. While most other independent car-makers were having rough going, Stukebaker sold more cars in September than any month in its history. From receivership less than 15 years ago, Studebaker has climbed back, is now the biggest independent—a smaller fourth to the Big Three.

The Locomotive God. Loewy first dreamed of building cars and locomotives in Paris, where he was born and spent the first 26 years of his life. His father, Maximilian, was a Viennese journalist; his mother, Marie Labalme, a sturdy Frenchwoman who prodded her children by continually telling them: “Better to be envied than pitied.” Young Raymond, the third of three sons, filled his school notebooks with so many sketches of locomotives, automobiles and airplanes that his parents sent him to engineering school.

But at 21, the student engineer was called off to World War I as a private. At the front, he decorated his dugout with flowered wallpaper, draperies and tufted pillows. He designed himself a new pair of pants because the government-issue pants were badly cut (“I enjoyed going into action well-dressed”). After four years of war−during which he was burned severely by mustard gas−he came out a captain, with a swatch of ribbons on his chest but no money in his pockets. His older brother Georges, a doctor in Manhattan, urged Raymond to join him. At 26, still wearing his captain’s uniform (the only clothing he had), Loewy sailed for the U.S. with a total capital of $40. Aboard ship, his sketching so impressed Sir Harry Gloster Armstrong, then British consul general in New York, that he gave him a note of introduction to Publisher Conde Nast.

The publisher, in turn, was also impressed by the Parisian suavity and horizon-blue uniform of the dapper young officer. He put him to work on fashion illustrations for Vogue, and Loewy swiftly demonstrated his unmatched ability to impress all the right people.

Before long, the benefit of his shrewd, appraising eye was being respectfully sought by such merchandising bigwigs as John Wanamaker and Horace Saks.

One day in 1927, at a friend’s home, he met Britain’s Sigmund Gestetner, maker of a famed old duplicating machine whose design had not been appreciably changed in 30 years. Loewy lugged the duplicator up to his apartment and built a clay model embodying his ideas. Gestetner liked it so well that he paid Loewy $2,000 for it and used the same design for 15 years afterward. (Gestetner paid him a yearly retainer not to design for any competitor.) Overnight, Fashion Artist Loewy decided to become an industrial designer.

75% Transportation. Loewy quickly found out that industrial design was not easy: it was “25% inspiration and 75% transportation.” He lugged briefcases of designs from one manufacturer to another around the U.S., barely sold enough to keep body and penthouse together for his first wife, Nebraska-born Jean Thomson. (Divorced in 1945, they parted “the best of friends,” and she still has a 4% interest in his company.)

His first big chance came when Sears, Roebuck & Co. hired him in 1934 to dress up its Coldspot refrigerator, an ugly machine with a dust trap under its spindly legs, and corrugated shelves inside. Loewy moved the motor, from top to bottom, chopped off the legs, and installed the first non-rusting aluminum shelves ever to be used in a refrigerator. The Coldspot became a single smooth, gleaming unit of functional simplicity—and with it Sears’ sales shot up five-fold by 1936. Loewy had been paid only $2,500 for the job (and had spent nearly three times that in expenses), but Sears was glad to pay him $25,000 for his next job. His reputation was made.

The Flea Market. As fortune followed fame, he began spending some of the fortune on his personal tastes−which are expensive. He usually spends part of the winter in the $100,000 dream house he designed and built in the desert near Palm Springs, Calif., complete with a swimming pool which curves into the living room. Summer always finds him back in France, where he has three homes. His relaxing spot is Le Torpillou (the Little Torpedo), a bright, red-tiled villa overlooking the Cote d’Azur at St. Tropez, and littered with such things as underwater fishing gear, which he seldom uses. Near Rambouillet, outside Paris, he has a 16th Century manor, La Cense, once a lovecote for Henri IV; it teems with game which Loewy seldom hunts, but he admires the elegant design of its peacocks. Last year he acquired an apartment on Paris’ Quai d’Orsay, decorated it with everything from braced halberds with baby-pink shafts and ribboned bows to crystal chandeliers picked up at Paris’ flea market.

In his Manhattan apartment, Loewy has blithely mixed a modern mirror fireplace, French period pieces, an Oriental shrine and a crystal chandelier reminiscent of Versailles. Instead of scattering his considerable collection of modern art (Picasso, Miro and Matisse) about the room, he hung them all frame-to-frame on one wall, used a big Dufy as a hinged cover to conceal his television set which is built into the wall. Some visitors might quail at such a mish mash, but Mrs. Loewy loyally approves it all, saying “I think he has good taste.” Loewy himself has given a more complex definition of his special talents. Says he: “Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the esthete unoffended.”

Clay Impressions. In the brave new world of industrial design, the brave new designers were hard at work trying to keep users happier by hundreds of new products.

Must telephones have their numbers where the dialing finger obscures them? Designer Dreyfuss’ new home telephone for the Bell System has the numbers outside.

How could chairs be made more comfortable? Manhattan’s Designer Egmont Arens thought it could be done by taking clay impressions of fat, skinny and in-between posteriors. A one-piece plastic chair with compound curves more comfortable than straight lines was being popped out by General American Transportation Corp. at the rate of one every five minutes.

Did all refrigerators and home freezers have to be white and hard to keep clean? Milwaukee’s Designer Brooks Stevens, who designed the Milwaukee Road’s gleaming new bubble-domed Hiawatha train, thought not; he had already turned out a blue freezer (for Ben Hur) which was making bigger companies sit up and take note.

Must theaters have only a small number of seats in the choicest orchestra rows? At Manhattan’s Savoy-Plaza hotel, Designer Bel Geddes was transforming about 10,000 square feet of lobby, dining and storage space into a modern theater which, devoid of a proscenium arch and extending the stage into the audience, boosts the orchestra seating from the average 300 to 800, using fewer rows of seats.

There were fine, luxurious new trains, buses, steamships and airliners built and abuilding. Designer Dreyfuss, who had conceived the New York Central’s first modern 20th Century trains, had many a supermodern ocean liner interior on the boards. Designer Teague’s cozy lounges, snack bars and dressing rooms were already aloft in Boeing’s new Stratocruiser. Not even the U.S. toilet had been neglected. Thanks to Designer Dreyfuss and the Crane Co., it was now available in form-fitting shapes.

The New Frontiers. For all the work that had been done, there still remained vast, unexplored regions of ugliness and inefficiency for the U.S. industrial designer to tackle. Designer Loewy last week summed up a few of the challenges:

“The world is filled with archaic objects−mailboxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which look like places to break out of rather than places to enter.

“Noise is a parasite. Anything noisy is poorly designed. And taxicabs! Why should you crawl into a cab on your hands & knees and then be unable to get out of the deep seats once you get into them? Subways are dirty, noisy, unattractive. The American soda fountain is disgraceful ; anyone who has ever smelled the midsummer-night stink of a sloppy soda fountain−decayed hamburger, sour milk, mustard and vanilla−can never forget it. The same goes for a telephone booth. Must one be crowded into a cramped, unventilated closet, use a mouthpiece which has been breathed into by thousands of people? Why not a two-way loudspeaker instead? Lincoln Steffens advised his son, who was worrying about what remained to be done, that nobody had yet made a faucet that didn’t leak. Well, it no longer leaks−but why not do something about the faucet itself? Is it necessary?”