U.S. INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27637, 19 April 1955, Page 6

U.S. INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER

RAYMOND LOEWY’S CAREER LIPSTICKS, LOCOMOTIVES, AND CAMERAS [U.S. Information Service] The egg is the world’s most perfect design, Mr Raymond Loewy, American industrial designer believes, and he has striven to approximate that functional perfection in the many designs he has created. • Refrigerators, toothbrushes, automobiles, locomotives, tractors, kitchen tools, ocean liners, aeroplanes and many other products of American and foreign manufacturers have been designed by Mr Loewy. Today, the French-born, American designer is recognised as one of the leading industrial designers in the United States and head of the largest industrial design firm in the world. Mr Loewy’s artistic creed is: “Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the aesthete unoffended.” Bearing out this theory, a rough estimate of total retail sales of all Loewy-styled products in a recent year totalled 3,500,000,000 dollars.

Mr Loewy was bne of a small group of innovators who began to apply the technique of functional design to everyday industrial products. At the outset, he had difficulty convincing manufacturers of the value of the new functionalism. In 1934, however, he achieved his first major success when he designed a refrigerator with non-rusting aluminum shelves. In 1937 this design won first prize at the Paris International Exposition and Mr Loewy’s importance in the field of industrial designing was recognised. During this same period, Mr Loewy designed his first locomotive—an electric version still in use today. Educated as an engineer, Mr Loewy began his career as a fashion illustrator. He was born Raymond Fernand Loewy in Paris in 1893. His father was an Austrian journalist and his mother a realistic Frenchwoman who often prodded her sons with the maxim: “It is better to be envied than pitied,”

While still a boy, he showed a talent for sketching, using his school hours in Paris as well as his leisure time to draw locomotives and automobiles. He built model aircraft when he was 14 years old —one of which won the J. Gordon Bennett prize for design and performance. During a voyage to America in 1919, Mr Loewy sketched a woman passenger. The drawing was purchased by the then British Consul-General of New York, who was impressed with the designer’s ability and gave him an introduction to the publisher of “Vogue,” a leading American fashion magazine. From, a successful career as a fashion illustrator for several American publications, Mr Loewy turned to industrial design. He had a basic idea; it is the concept that every object, no matter how simple or how complex, has an ideal form which can express its function with economy and grace.

At present he is consultant to over 125. American and foreign companies. In 1945 he formed the Raymond Loewy Associates with four partners. The firm has expanded to a staff of over 200 with offices in Europe and South America. “Any Problem”

The firm undertakes almost any problem in design. It has designed lipsticks, electric shavers, radios, cameras and bathroom scales; it creates distinctive designs for labels and packaging; and it undertakes full engineering problems such as buildings, automobiles and locomotives. One Loewy-designed product is the Studebaker automobile, selected by the Museum of Modern Art for its second exhibition “Ten Automobiles.” Another recent product is the Ansco “Anscoflex” camera, which was exhibited at the 10th Milan Triennale and was selected by the Museum of Modern Art for the 1955 Good Design Show. x The interiors of the Lever Building in New York City—an expansive structure of glass over a steel framework—were designed by Raymond Loewy Associates. Office desks are adjustable in height and have rounded comers. Each floor has a different colour scheme based on three basic schemes that can be interchanged for maximum variety. Lewis Mumford said in “New Yorker” magazine: “I don’t know of any other building in the city in which so much colour has been used with such skill over a large area.”

His talents do not stop at buildings or automobiles. In 1953, he created a line of furniture which he called the Prismata group because of its woods stained in colour. Loewy also introduced 13 patterns in modern design dinnerware manufactured in Germany for the American market. In one year this porcelain dinnerware jumped from eigtheenth to second place in United States’ sales. A second, more expensive line was introduced in February, 1955. Mr Loewy devoted two years’ study to the design of this china. As he says: “Revolutions happen overnight; evolutions require time.”

In the packaging and label field, Loewy Associates have studied and changed a countless variety of commonplace products. Perhaps one example which shows welj the Loewy simplicity and grace is the decanter and carton designed for a bourbon whisky. Both the decanter and the carton were awarded the first prize

in the liquor category of the Package Designers Competition of 1954. The same simplicity and purity of form characterise a bathroom scale which the firm executed last year It was awarded a gold medal by the Industrial Designers Institute for outstanding design of a mass-produced article.

Th ls simplicity of character contrasts with the full, rich personality revealed in Mr Loewy’s autobiography, “Never Leave Well Enough Alone,” published !P A " New Yorker” critic described it as “instructive, brash cocksure, occasionally funny, sometimes vulgar and always honest.” Of the man himself, “Time” calls his voice “subdued, at the same time apologetic and compelling. His face is gently, sad and . . . inscrutable.

Mr Loewy has been called “a man without whose perseverance this country would be an uglier place to live in A writer has said “Loewy has probably affected the daily life of more Americans than any other man of his time.”

Yet Mr Loewy with his wife, Viola and his baby daughter, Laurence, lives quietly in a midtown New York apartment which reflects his delight for elegance coupled with neatness. He' became an American citizen in 1938. In the future, Mr Raymond Loewy and his firm will continue to add their singular touch of beauty to cigarette packages, aeroplanes, stores and whote community projects. They have just finished passenger car interiors for the Northern Pacific Railrcad and are now at work on two liners !or the MooreMcCormack Steamship Company.