א. רקע הסטורי

Raymond Loewy was born in Paris in 1893, the son of Maximilian Loewy, a Viennese journalist, and Marie Labalme.

"As a boy I had liked both drawing and physics, and I always abhorred the role of being a spectator. In 1908, when I was 15, I designed, built and flew a toy model airplane which won the then-famous James Gordon Bennett Cup. By 16 I had discovered that design could be fun and profitable, and this lesson has never been lost on me.”
Raymond Loewy

Loewy went to Chaptal Collage, a respectable school in Paris.
Young Loewy served in the French Army Corps in World War I, became a captain, on the General Staff of the Vth Army.
He immigrated to the United States in the fall of 1919. Loewy started his career in New York. He made his first steps as fashion Illustrator for such magazines as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and National Geographic. At some point of his career Loewy longed to do something closer to his early interest in engineering. As Glenn Porter writes in his introduction to the Johns Hopkins Edition of the "Never Leave Well Enough Alone": "American products he felt were marvels of production and functionality but were also unnecessarily and unbearably ugly, noisy, smelly, and offensive". Near the end of 1920s Loewy entered the emerging ranks of industrial designers. Due to his talent and charisma Loewy was able to get to the forefront of the industrial design field in the quickest way.
Soon he ran the largest and most powerful of the nation's consultant design organizations.
In 1938 he became a U.S. citizen.
In 1949 Raymond Loewy had appeared on the cover of Time, the first designer to do so.
His firm worked for many years for the nation's leading corporations – the Pennsylvania Railroad, Frigidaire, Nabisco, Greyhound, Studebaker, Shell, International Harvester, Coca-Cola, and scores of others. The Loewy studios crafted such icons as the Lucky Strike cigarette packet the Exxon name and logo the livery and decorations for Air Force One, the Sears Coldspot refrigerator, and the habitats for many of the manned vehicles of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Raymond Loewy was founding member and fellow of the American Society of Industrial Designers and its president during 1946
Loewy died in 1986 .
He was named one of the "100 most influential Americans of the 20th century" by Life magazine and one of the "'thousand makers of the 20th century" by the
Sunday Times.

ב. הזירה העיצובית

Often Lowey is referred to as inventor of the streamline style. The most important characteristics of the style are speed lines and streamlined forms that symbolize the dynamism of the modern times. Loewy tried to create a feeling of the innate kinetic energy in his objects. One of his great concepts was disguising a product's functional part under a fashionable shell.

Loewy introduced curved rear windows in cars- as an example the 1954 Studebaker Champion. He brought some important improvements into different areas of the daily life such as smooth kitchen surfaces for easy cleaning and more headroom inside airplanes. In every product he designed the goal was to make it more "user-friendly" and visually attractive.
The stuff of the Loewy design team was numerous but he managed to constantly dominate the whole design process and the design philosophy of the company. Loewy had been not only a talented designer but also a great manager. He used to say: "First and foremost we apply our creativity to generating ideas". Loewy not only generated ideas but also accumulated young and talented designers of that time. One of the great examples is the Star Liner that is also known as the "First American Sports Car". Most of the design work on that car is done by Robert E. Brouke (1916-1996), although Loewy usually receives the credit. The innovative characteristics of the car included concealed radiator, limited use of chrome, and wider and lower appearance than what was standard at the time.

Working for NASA Skylab, conducted from 1967 to 1973 was on of the most important challenges for Raymond Lowey. With the help of his design team Lowey remarkably improved the conditions of the astronauts on long missions by suggesting inclusion of a viewing porthole, which allowed the astronauts to have a view of earth.
Loewy also installed a triangular dining table, a concept that no man from the three-person crew could be at its "head".

ג. סיפור ההתחלה

Loewy's start as an industrial designer had been the improvement of the existing Gestetner duplicator in 1929. Sigmund Gestetner was somewhat skeptical of Lowey's ability to improve the existing design. Lowey was given only three days to redesign the duplicating machine. Loewy had no time for major changes and came up with simple but brilliant solution which was hiding all the mechanical elements of the machine in wooden shell. "Upon agreement, Loewy purchased one hundred dollars worth of Plasticine clay, spread a tarpaulin on the floor of his small living room, covered the original machine with clay, and reshaped it into a handsome cabinet that concealed all of the mechanisms except the operating controls. In effect Loewy transformed what was the product from a collection of mechanisms into a piece of office furniture". (1) It was a great success.

Soon after that Loewy signed up with the Hupp Motor Company and it was the beginning of his industrial design career. The 1932 V-8 Spider Cabriolet was the first car that Lowey was satisfied with. His 1934 Hupp mobile designs, though elegant, failed to rescue the company and were discontinued in 1936.

In 1933 Loewy opened an office and engaged several designers in two his projects. The firm was expending quickly. Once established his business, Lowey, like the other leaders of large consultant design firms, provided oversight and a sense of direction but delegated most of the day-to-day design tasks to subordinates. All the firm's designs were said to be his, and his name went on all the drawings because the wider his fame, the easier to get work for the business. Loewy's primary job was to be the firm's brand, to win and then to retain clients, and to hire and manage talented staffers.

One of the early successful works was the Cold spot refrigerator, designed for Sears. With the new design refrigerator' sales went sky-high. This was one of the first cases of styling for mass production by the design consultant.
Following S-1 Steam locomotive for the Pennsylvania was extremely successful and establishing higher standards in this industry field. "The success of the GG-1 project and the famous Refuse Receptacle led the Pennsylvania to put Loewy on a retainer, securing his “exclusive services in the railway field.” The contract called for Loewy to receive an annual payment, at first $20,000, later ranging up to $25,000. In addition, the Pennsylvania would pay for labor, materials, and overhead charges. During the years the Loewy organization worked for the railroad, its income from this account sometimes exceeded $100,000." (2)
In 1940 Loewy redesigned Lucky Strike pack. Classic transformation of the package included: replacing the green background with white, turning the circular motif into a stronger target device, making both sides of the pack identical by featuring the target on both sides,
sharpening up the typography. Loewy pointed out that his Lucky Strike package design brought new ideas about cigarette packs.
(1)
Angela Schoenberger (author), "Raymond Loewy: Pioneer of American Industrial Design". Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1990, p 232, 75, 36
(2)
Glenn Porter (author), "Raymond Lowey and the Pennsylvania railroad", http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1996/4/1996_4_8.shtml

ד. השקפת העולם האידאולוגית העיצובית והתשתית התיאור...

Loewy was a star figure. And as a true star he maintained a luxury lifestyle. He had homes in France, Mexico, and various locations in United States. His world wide image was enhanced by his design offices in London, Paris, San Juan, and Sao Pauli and others.

New profession of industrial design became an exciting and popular element of the modern lifestyle. Struggling through the taught times of the Great Depression industrial design became a beacon of the production industry.
Raymond Loewy's office covered a huge amount of the products successful due to its new design concept.

Loewy's design philosophy is summarized with the acronym MAYA (most advanced, yet acceptable). The proliferation of clean, functional, and dynamic products that emerged from the Loewy offices throughout his long career provides testimony to his success in correctly making the prediction "Most advanced, yet acceptable".

Loewy:
“I once said that the most difficult things to design are the simplest. For instance, to improve the form of a scalpel or a needle is extremely difficult, if not impossible. To improve the appearance of a threshing machine is easy. There are so many components on which one can work.”

ה. השלכות טכנולוגיות וכלכליות

After the Wall Street crash in 1929 American companies turned to the field of industrial design hoping to increase sales and simply survive. It was the first time that the product design was taken so seriously.

Loewy was on of the first designers who clearly understood the link between design and the economy.

He said:
"Between two products equal in price, function, and quality, the better looking will outsell the other".

"The goal of design is to sell, the loveliest curve I know is the sales curve".
It was a real challenge to work during the Depression. Raymond Lowey managed to design products that sold extremely well. His bright outstanding designs brought a feeling of optimism in to 1950s.

The Streamline Design represented the new fast moving future, with its technological and visual innovations, advocating consumers demand.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Streamline design, a visual simplification of the product, by hiding all the unwelcome elements inside the clean lines shell, had an impact of lowering production costs.

ו. תמורות חברתיות ופוליטיות

Loewy's success helped to establish the essential role of the industrial designer in product developing and manufacturing process. Industrial design had been legitimized as a profession. Raymond Loewy helped to establish the first professional organization for industrial designers, the Industrial Designers Society of America, which today is still in existence as the Industrial Designers Society of America [IDSA].
Loewy’s contributions to the design community helped propel industrial design to new heights. He lectured frequently to design students and spent a lot of time in Europe in the 70’s and 80’s training young designers. As a result, a whole new generation of industrial designers found their inspiration in Loewy and his designs.
Loewy was the first designer who introduced annual model changes into the home appliance market arena.
It is estimated that at the peak of his career over 75% of Americans came into contact with one or more of his products every day.

No doubt Loewy made a huge contribution into shaping contemporary environment. The impact can be traced in all areas of modern life.

ז. השפעות של הסביבה העיצובית והתרבותית

In early 1920 German Bauhaus design school created first serious efforts to integrate art and engineering for modern mass production. The main moving force was an architect Walter Gropius, who later moved to the United States. The influence of the Bauhaus school had a world wide impact and by the 1930 four independent industrial design consultancies were established in New York. Raymond Loewy was one of these.


"Then dark interiors and ungainly machines of the century's early years gave away in the 1920s and 1930s to the brighter, smoother, more colorful, and constantly changing look of the modern era. Americans welcomed this designed world: the modern age meant endless novelty in goods and services, in the interiors of homes, stores, and offices, in automobiles and appliances, and in all the things in manufactured world.
The coming of mass production had removed ancient constraints on output and unleashed enormous quantities of goods."(1)


As Loewy rights in his book "Never leave well enough alone":
"In 1942 it became clear that industry should get prepared for the post war period in order to be able to absorb the demobilized G.I.'s as fast as they could be released: also in order to reduce or eliminate a potentially disastrous production gap between war production and post war manufacturing. This had to be done without interfering in the slightest with war production. In fact, it was often impossible to even reach the engineers, and we did our best to go ahead on our own. For instance when the war ended we had succeeded in developing a complete line of entirely new automobile bodies for Studebaker, ready for the tool and die makers… It was without using any critical materials and naturally without any guidance as to what postwar automobile styling likely to be. We used our judgment, and we were lucky enough to guess right. …However, our luck was helped to some extent by a certain amount of logic which we applied to the problem. Simple, sound factors such as better visibility, lighter weight, and fast, slender appearance."


(1)
Glenn Porter (author), "Never Leave Well Enough Alone", Introduction to the John Hopkins Edition, 2002

ח. ההישגים המרכזיים, ואבני הדרך המשמעותיים

Loewy created designs for such major American companies as Sears Roebuck, Shell, International Harvester, Exxon and Coca-Cola.
Fore Sears Loewy created the steel frame for the 1935 "Super Six Cold spot" refrigerator, he also designed new versions, changing the exterior so it can be updated yearly. For Pennsylvania Railroad Company he designed "S-I" train, featured at the 1937 New York World's Fair, as well as their "K45" locomotive. Raymond Loewy was responsible for Studebaker's 1947 "Champion," and the 1950 "Commander" with round edges and a subtle fin motif. He also designed busses for Greyhound. Loewy contributed to the New York World's Fair a prototype for a streamlined rocket ship in 1939. In the early 1960s, Loewy was hired by the Kennedy White House for several projects; he also designed a commemorative postage stamp in memory of John F. Kennedy, in 1964. In the late 1960's he was commissioned by NASA to create the interior for their Skylab space capsule.
Raymond Loewy received the gold medal, in transportation (for GG-1 locomotive
design), international exposition, Paris 1937.

By 1939 Loewy became a Fellow (FRSA) of The British Royal Society of Arts. He also was granted the title of Royal designer to Industry (RDI).

He had become a member of the Advisory Board of New York's Board of Education. Loewy was also a founding member of the American Society of Industrial Designers, and its president in 1946.

Raymond Loewy published his autobiography "Never leave well enough alone" in 1951, and authored "Industrial design" in 1979.

He was granted an award from the president of France, and in 1980 became honorary citizen of France.
A line from New York Times: “From toothbrushes to automobiles, Raymond Loewy’s streamlined designs of thousands of consumer goods and their packaging radically changed the look of American life.”

ט. הכשלונות והכשלים

Below is a fragment from Loewy's autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone"(1951) which appears to be a great example of some difficulties and obstacles Loewy had to overcome promoting his vision of simplicity and style. Such episodes were present at different stages of his career. Fortunately Raymond Loewy had the talent and the charisma to convince the client that the product is going to sell ever since:
"…The critter commissioned me to do one key window on herald Square. At that time the technique was to cram the window with a truckload of stuff, including half a dozen dummies on which tones of merchandise were piled up in layers. The result looked somewhat like a drawing room in the mansion of those two eccentric Collyer brothers of upper Fifth Avenue who never went out in fifteen years and were found dead under a piano or something. My feeling for simplicity blended with a dash of French logic indicated a different solution. That same night I worked out my scheme along simple lines. I dresses one dummy with a neat black evening gown, spread a luscious mink coat at its feet, and casually scattered around some accessories. Instead of the usual blaze of diffused floodlights, I left the window in semidarkness. The only illumination came from three powerful spotlights focused on the figure. The result was a contrast of violet highlights and deep shadows. It was dramatic, simple, and potent. It sang.
Around midnight, pleased with my experiment, I went to get a few hours' rest before the store's opening in the morning. Then I returned to see the results. There was quite a crowd in front of "my display". Mostly executives. They were talking in hushed tones as if the founders' daughter had been found raped in the window. It was a cataclysm, all right. Window dressers were already on the scene of the disaster doing rescue work by bringing armfuls of merchandise in order to repair the damage. My boss was in the window too, puffing and sweating in the flood-lights. I quickly figured out that if I could get in store fast, I might have a chance to reach the window, take him by surprise, and say "I'm through" before he had a chance "You are fired!" This is exactly what happened. To this day I have a satisfaction of being able to say that I've never been fired. Some may call it a close decision on technicality, but it stands nevertheless. This was first job I ever had; it lasted twenty-four hours, and I decided there and then that I would never accept a position with any firm again. I would be my own boss."

י. ביקורת וניתוח כולל של התופעה העיצובית

The streamline style is somewhat a visual artistic reflection of the technological innovations and developments that burst in the beginning of the XXth century. Admiration of new fast moving aircrafts brings the concept of the optimal airflow down to the vacuum cleaners and toasters. Everything is trying to look like it is going to take-off in a minute. This concept appealed to everyone.
Industrial design started affecting new fields of products bringing the streamline everywhere.
Although simple and not expensive products were most in need of the professional designers' services, Major companies such as Pennsylvania Railroad, Sears Roebuck and Studebaker Corporation having the resources tested validity of the new style. In 1939 Loewy was put in charge of styling for the Studebaker.

"When these 1946-7 Studebakers appeared, there were brief jibes from the skeptics who maintained that it was impossible to tell whether the cars were coming or going, but it did not take long for the world to be sure that this utterly novel styling was the coming thing: within a few years, it was commonplace for ordinary saloons to feature a 3-box, turret-top composition in which the rearmost box (the luggage boot) was as substantial as the foremost or engine compartment, and in which the area of glazing to provide vision to the rear was almost as great as that at the front of the turret within which the passengers were lodged. It was a re-proportioning that struck at the very roots of car styling and engineering, one which was perhaps more fundamental and successful than any since Maybach's 1901 Mercedes and Budd's 1916 Dodge, or before the 1959 Mini of Issigonis. With its unaccustomed symmetry and its wrap-round glass, the Studebaker set fashions that persist today. For a while Studebaker prospered, but it was not for long. It may even be questioned whether that brief prosperity was of Loewy's making, for as Alfred P. Sloan wrote in his outstanding book My Life with General Motors: With the resumption of production after World War Two it was necessary because of shortages, particularly of steel, for the industry to operate under material controls. These allocations favored the smaller manufacturers (Kaiser-Frazer, Nash, Hudson, Studebaker and Packard) whose product presentation at that time was concentrated in the medium-price range, with the result that the proportion of the market accounted for by their cars increased sharply. Competition in this period was largely con- fined to production - that is, whatever a manufacturer could make, customers were waiting to purchase. In the years after 1948, normal competitive influences began to reassert themselves in some areas of the market, and the sales of the smaller manufacturers in the medium-price group declined."(1)


Loewy's car designs created a great impact on the whole car industry with its loud echo into the present days. Unfortunately Studebaker Company could not be saved even with such a great design masterpiece as Avanti of 1962. The car had ergonomically- integrated controls and functionally-coherent shape. Avanti as a model was saved for a limited production which lasted for another 10 years.

(1) Coachbuilt.com (source) "Raymond Loewy 1893-1986", http://www.coachbuilt.com/des/l/loewy/loewy.htm

יא. השוואה לדוגמא אחרת בהסטוריהשל העיצוב.

Henry Dreyfuss was one of the leaders and pioneers of American industrial designers. Dreyfuss made a huge contribution to development of industrial design. He along with other great industrial designers established a design consultancy as a reputable and business-like profession.

In 1929, Dreyfuss won a "phone of the future" competition by Bell Laboratories and began work in 1930 in collaboration with Bell staff. The result of this association was the "300" tabletop telephone, with a receiver and transmitter in a "combined handset" resting in a horizontal cradle. Molded in black phenolic plastic, it was introduced in 1937 and produced until 1950.
"He insisted he work in conjunction with Bell's engineers to design `from the inside out'. Fearing Dreyfuss would be compromised by the realities of engineering, Bell refused to allow him to work this way. Upon receiving work from others that proved to be impossible to build, they decided to retain Dreyfuss to work his own way and what resulted is basically the same phone we all use today. Bell introduced the handset in 1927, but it was Dreyfuss' combined handset that became the standard from 1937 on. His phone design was in production until 1950, but practically every phone since then has been modeled after it. The design used 1940s plastic, allowing for easy molding. Its elements were reduced to a minimum so it was easy to use, fix, and clean. It was necessary that the phone be simple in styling and not too trendy. The telephone market in those days was not highly competitive, so if someone were to invest in a phone, it was likely to be around for a long time. Dreyfuss iterated countless times on the design of this phone. Working with Bell engineers, they methodically studied and tested the phone with scores of people. Dreyfuss' many measurements and studies of humans and machines led to his book, The Measure of Man. His work made enormous contributions to the introduction of the applied science of ergonomics". (1)

Starting form the 1930 some new specification can be seen such as "streamline design" resulting from technical studies, and the "stream form design" based on purely aesthetic aspect. Two different camps of industrial designers emerge: Dreyfuss, Bel Geddes, and Buckminster Fuller as functionalists, and Loewy, Earl- stream aesthetics.

As Loewy had all the skills in making products desirable, Dreyfuss was skilled in making products usable. Both they created great physical consumer products.

The rivalry between Loewy and Dreyfuss existed though Henry Dreyfuss said that "Loewy is the best advert the profession has".
Opposite of Raymond Loewy Dreyfuss was not interested in styling; he tried to apply common senses and scientific approach in his design process and made a stress on utility of the product. He made significant contributions to the fields of ergonomics, anthropometrics, and human factors. His approach to industrial design is described in his book Designing for People (1955, 2nd ed. 1967). Dreyfuss has been referred to as "the conscience of the industrial design profession" because of his humanist attitude to design.
Henry Dreyfuss said that" when the point of contact between the product and people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.”

(1) Brad Weed (author)
"Visual Interaction Design: The Industrial Design of the Software Industry", http://sigchi.org/bulletin/1996.3/vid.html

יב. סיכום

"None of the early American practitioners invented industrial design....Nor was the profession conceived abroad and introduced [into America]....[I]industrial design emerged in the United States as a distinct calling in direct response to the unique demand of the....machine age for individuals who were qualified by intellect, talent and sensitivity to give viable form to mass-produced objects."

Arthur J. Pulos, "American Design Ethic, A History of American Industrial Design to 1940", MIT, Cambridge, Mass 1983.

Raymond Loewy is one of the principal inventors of modern industrial design; he redefined the look of naturally everything starting from logos and to locomotives.


Bibliography
Ann Lee Morgan (editor), James M. Alexander from "Contemporary Designers", St. James Press, London and Chicago, 1985)
Raymond Loewy – "Industrial Design", Overlook TP (September 5, 2000)
Raymond Loewy – "Never Leave Well Enough Alone", Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 2002
Arthur J. Pulos - "American Design Ethic, A History of American Industrial Design to 1940", MIT, Cambridge, Mass 1983.
Gideon, Siegfried - Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Norton, 1969.
Angela Schoenberger – "Raymond Loewy: Pioneer of American Industrial Design". Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1990

References:
Glenn Porter – "Troubled Marriage: Raymond Loewy and the Pennsylvania Railroad"
Stanley Marcus - "Minding the Store"
Alexander, M. J. (1985) - "Raymond Loewy: an American industrial designer"
Dennis Adler – "The Art of the Sports Car: The Greatest Designs of the 20th Century"
Brad Weed – "Visual Interaction Design: The Industrial Design of the Software Industry"


Sources:
www.designboom.com/portrait/loewy_transportations.html
www.raymondloewy.com
www.raymondloewyfoundation.com
www.loewygroup.com
www.hud.ac.uk
www.://sigchi.org
www.studebakermuseum.org
www.oobject.com/category/12-classic-raymond-loewy-designs/
www.art.net/Lile/loewy/designer.html
www.coachbuilt.com/des/l/loewy/loewy.htm
www.answers.com/topic/henry-dreyfuss
www.goodreads.com