Designed more than 70 years ago, the Model 410 meat slicer, also known as the Streamliner, is not just a utilitarian object for the food service industry. It is also a wonderful example of streamlining, a style of Modernism that combines principles of aerodynamic engineering with geometry, often characterized by smooth rhythmic surfaces and forms...
Industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s career spanned six decades, from about 1920 to 1986, during which he was active in Europe and the United States, with offices in Paris, London, New York, and Chicago. By 1951, he directed a design staff of over one hundred and forty. Loewy and his firm are noted for their prodigious...
Kristian Vedel is primarily known as a furniture designer, trained by the Danish architect-designer Kaare Klint and strongly influenced by Klint's standards of economy, function and simplicity. Vedel established his own studio in 1955. These stacking egg cups are one of his early innovative designs, part of the Gourmet line of plastic tableware from about 1958....
The R-72, also called the “Toot-A-Loop,” is a wonderful example of Pop Art-inspired design. Departing from the square box format, this battery-operated portable radio is shaped like a donut with an off-center hole. It could be worn on the wrist like a bracelet or carried like a purse. Simply by twisting the swivel joint at...
Virginia Hamill, one of the first American women in the field of industrial design, called herself a “decorative art consultant.” Under this broad title, she gained prominence as an exhibition organizer and designer, retail merchandiser, product stylist, and interior designer and educator. She was influential in her use of department store exhibitions to introduce European...
From the archives, an Object of the Day blog post on the portable Sony TV-8-301, the world’s first fully transistorized television set, the first direct-view transistor TV, and the first Japanese TV to be sold in the US. Now on view in Bob Greenberg Selects
“I’ll send it to Bob Cratchit’s!” whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. “He shan’t know who sends it….”[1] Not long after re-reading “A Christmas Carol,” I was reminded of mid twentieth-century Christmases and gift giving when I came across our research file for this Tiffany & Co. silver telephone dialer. The main...
The Landi chair, created by the self-taught designer Hans Coray, was one of the first highly successful designs for seating furniture using sheet aluminum, a relatively new material in the 1930s. Introduced in Zurich, at the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition (Schweizerische Landesaustellung, nicknamed “Landi”), the chair was the official seating for the exhibition grounds. Aluminum...
Fascinated by what he calls the “magical and mystical” qualities of light, lighting designer Ingo Maurer plays with conventional notions of brightness, shadow, and color. Trained as a typographer and graphic artist, Maurer worked in the United States before returning to Europe in 1963, where he was active as a graphic designer. The trigger for...
