| Issue #2- April 6, 2007 |
Rocketships & Tailfins
The Work of the Most Influential Designer of the 20th Century Here
By Dan Rattiner
The works of Raymond Loewy, one of the greatest industrial designers of the past century, will be on display at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton for the next two months.
Raymond Loewy designed Air Force One, the interior of NASA’s Skylab, the Greyhound SemiCruiser, hundreds of other products and stores, and did work for Coca Cola, Exxon, Nabisco and probably most famously of all, Studebaker. At the Parrish, two Studebaker automobiles are on display, one he designed in 1954 and the other in 1964. They are good examples of his work, but they are nothing compared to what is surely his masterpiece, another Studebaker, which he designed in 1950. That automobile, which you could buy in any showroom and drive home, became the model for automotive design for the next quarter of a century. It prompted one magazine to declare Loewy, “the man who most influenced design in this country during the entire 20th Century.”
I am sure you are aware of what cars looked like in the 1930s. They were black, square and solid, and they all looked pretty much alike from one manufacturer to another. Today, we call them gangster cars.
All automobile manufacturing was shut down for during the duration of the Second World War as factories retooled to make tanks and guns. After the war, in 1946, they began making cars again and they pretty much picked up where they left off.
Then came the 1950 Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy. My dad drove home with one that year. I was ten years old. It looked like a rocketship. A picture of it accompanies this article.
Of course it made perfect sense. Cars took you from point A to point B. Rocketships took you to the moon. Same idea.
The 1950 Studebaker stood out among all the black, square automobiles being sold at that time like a princess among peasants. Immediately, all the other car manufacturers leapt in to match it and, in just a few years, made cars similar to it themselves. Thus began the era of cars with tailfins and wrap-around windshields, rocketship grills, chrome, and two-tone paint jobs. The love affair with this style lasted for an entire generation.
The mark of Raymond Leowy is still prevalent today in a project he took on in Montauk in the 1960s. Some developers in that town owned a 500-acre tract of waterfront property down by the Montauk Fishing Village. They asked Leowy to design a vacation home for the masses. They would produce, on half a dozen winding roads on this property, about 800 of these homes. They would have to be cheap, yet beautiful.
Leowy decided he could design not only the houses, but also the linens, the silverware and dishes, the rugs, the desks and pens, the beds, sofas and curtains. By mass producing these items (well, at least producing 800 of them), a completely furnished house could be put on the market for about one quarter of the price of a regular house. That it would have been designed by him, made it a work of art. What an idea.
The project, called Culloden Shores, named after a famous British Man O’ War by that name that sank on the coastline there in 1812 (its remains are still there at the bottom of the sea), was offered to the public with great fanfare in 1963. The contract for the manufacture of the interior of these houses was overseen by Macy’s Department Store, and an actual full scale house, exactly like it would be at Culloden, was built on the Fifth Floor of that department store in Manhattan in 1964.
The project was a huge success, relatively speaking. In the end, over 200 homes were built. And they were sold, at first for an astonishing $9,950 each and, later, for $14,000 a piece. They were arguably the best bargain ever in the Hamptons. At the time, homes of that caliber were selling for about $70,000. And they are there today, though practically all of them have been expanded upon and modified from the original design by subsequent owners. Today, if you’ve got $700,000, you could probably buy one.
In 1968, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, another one of these houses was built in a Moscow park as part of a trade fair being held there. That year, our President Richard Nixon escorted the Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev through this house, and when they got to the kitchen, with its automatic dishwasher, formica tabletops, chrome bar stools and new kitchen appliances, they stopped and sat on stools at the counter and got into an argument.
Nixon argued that the way of the future was western style capitalism. Khruschev argued that the way of the future was Communism. Photographs of them having this argument while sitting in this replica kitchen in Moscow were reprinted around the world, and the encounter was, and is, still known as the Kitchen Debate.
Soon after, Khruschev was to be seen at the United Nations banging his shoe on a desk and shouting at the Americans, “We will bury you!” Well, we know how that turned out.
The show will be on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton until May 27.
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