“Every time I see a picture of Freud, I wonder how a man who has studied sex all his life can have such a sad look,” reflected Raymond Loewy in his book “Never Leave Well Enough Alone,” ( «’What is ugly is not for sale»)
Paris, November 1893, Raymond Fernand Loewy was born. His father, of Austrian descent, is a writer specializing in economics.
He is fifteen years old and
go to bagatelle to see the exhibitions of the aviator Santos Dumont. Fascinated, the fifteen-year-old teenager designs a small model of an airplane whose propeller moves by turning a rubber band.
With this miniature aircraft he won the Gordon Bennet Cup in his category and sold the production rights; the toys become a commercial success and he discovers that designing is fun and makes him money.
And with the money he receives, he pays for his studies at the University of Paris and later at the École de Lanneau, where he graduated in 1918 as an engineer. He is intelligent, engaging and with a sophisticated and gourmet style that make him the center of attention among his peers.
In 1914 he was mobilized before the German invasion, but even during the war he showed a well-known penchant for luxury, for aesthetics, to the point of having his uniform cut by a prestigious tailor; “I liked going forward well dressed.” Frivolous? No doubt, but this does not prevent him from fighting with heroism, as evidenced by seven awards and four citations. In 1918 the guns fell silent, the armistice was signed and Loewy kept his French army captain’s uniform, along with his Croix de Guerre.
He has lost his parents in the conflict and decides to start a new life. Board the ocean liner SS France bound for the United States. When he disembarks in Manhattan, he has fifty dollars in his pocket and many ambitions. He is amazed at what he sees, which he will later describe as “the gulf between the outstanding quality of American production and its looks, coarseness, volume and noise”.
Looking for work, but despite
your education and experienceHe sees how one door after another closes in front of him. He has no choice but to accept a job as a window dresser at Macy’s. It is a means of making ends meet when looking for a job as an illustrator in the press or advertising.
He made contact with Rodman Wanemaker, director of a department store chain, and with Condé Nast, founder of the press group that bears his name. Thus, he became the fashion illustrator for ‘Vogue’, ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ magazines, among others.
In 1929 he left the fashion world and opened his own industrial design studio. Not only is Loewy a design genius, but he also knows how to promote himself; on his business card he says; “Between two products with the same price, function and quality, the prettiest sells more”. In addition, its physical
He has an undeniable air of a brave man from Hollywood, helps him and shows a captivating mix of swagger and sympathy that breaks through many barriers.
His first assignment comes from Sigmund Gestetner’s company, who entrusts him with the new design of the housing of his duplicator. Loewy simplifies the forms, integrates the accessories to create, from an archaic machine, a functional, clean, beautiful object… and more user-friendly; the design revolution is underway. Incidentally, he started using plasticine in his work, a technique that he later used with great success in his car designs.
The new decade aims to put the disaster of 1929 behind it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt finds a nation shattered and demoralized when he enters the White House as president on March 4, 1933. The Great Depression, after the crisis of 1929, has left millions of Americans in the lines of unemployment, of misery.
In the month of May, the Democratic president launches the New Deal, a plan that includes short-time work, the imposition of a minimum wage,
bank protectionthe devaluation of the dollar… A few days later the Chicago Exposition opens its doors under the title ‘A century of Progress’. Americans expect progress to come from both politicians and industrialists. The designers show that they can contribute to the economic but also moral recovery of the country.
Loewy was one of the protagonists, along with Walter Trague, Henry Dreyfus, Harold Van Doren or Norman Bel Geddes, of that new American aesthetic of post-crisis recovery. They imagined an environment under the sign of the ‘streamline’, they imposed fluid forms from architecture to furniture passing through trains or cars.
In 1932 the Huppmobile company consulted him about a new model; It is Loewy’s first contact with the automotive world. He made the prototypes F-222 and I-226 which, although conventional, already had interesting innovations, such as the fins around the wheels (with chrome rims by the way) or the shape of the windshield radiator.
But it will be with the 1934 Hupmobile where one can speak of a revolution in shapes with its ‘Aerodynamic’ line in which the headlights are integrated into the sides of the bonnet, the panoramic windscreen is incorporated and the spare wheel is streamlined.
Launched at the time of the radical Chrysler Airflow (one of the greatest exponents of the ‘streamline’), the ’34 Hupmobile illustrates the principle of the ‘MAYA’ so dear to Raymond Loewy; ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’ (very modern, but acceptable) indicating the point above which innovation is not permissible.
That same year, Loewy designed the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears Roebuck, the first appliance to be marketed with confidence in its aesthetics; advertisements at the time invited consumers to “study their beauty”. The Coldspot also appealed to consumers because its design had reduced production costs and this was reflected in its competitive retail price.
In the fall of 1933, Loewy rented an office on the 54th floor of a skyscraper at 500 5th Avenue, where he hired two designers and a secretary. Loewy’s office, through its distribution and decoration, is so representative of the American aesthetic renaissance of those years that
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited a model of it in one of his rooms. Within Roosevelt’s New Deal, design became one of the engines of economic recovery. Loewy brings all the symbols and aspirations of the American way of life up to date.
Through the Greyhound bus, the Coca-Cola vending machine, the Lucky Strike tobacco pack, Loewy responds to the American consumer fever; design is just as important as usability when advertising a product.
But it’s the speed, the movement,
the world of transportation the one that continues to fascinate Loewy. Thus he designed the famous aerodynamic locomotives, K4S (1934), the GG-1 (1934) and the T-1 (1937) for the Pennsylvania Railroad, or the packet boat Pincess Ann, and began his association with the Studebaker automobile brand. In 1937 he took American nationality and published his book ‘The New Vision Locomotiva’. The pinnacle of the Streamline decade came in 1939 with the 1939 New York Fair, under the banner of “Tomorrow’s World.” After the Second World War he designed the Lincoln Continental in 1945 and in 1946 he rebuilt the Greyhound carriages.
He is the fashionable man. He married a spectacular Norwegian blonde in 1948,
Viola Ericson, who is thirty years younger than him. They are the center of social life in the United States and Europe. Among his friends are André Malraux, Georges Carpentier, Edward VIII, the Kennedy family… image for years. In 1949 it was featured on the cover of ‘Time Magazine’, an honor unattained by any designer until then.
That same year
Loewy expanded his business and founded the Raymond Loewy Corporation to carry out architectural projects. It will have more than 200 employees across its studios in New York, South Bend, Chicago, Los Angeles and London. In 1952 he opened his Industrial Aesthetics Company in Paris.
In the 1960s and 1970s he worked as a designer for the US government; It is worth noting his redesign of Air Force One for John F. Kennedy or the interior design of NASA’s Skylab (1967 to 1973), undoubtedly his last great creation.
In the automotive world, he left his mark on series models: the Studebaker Starliner (1953) and especially Avanti (1962), true cult objects.
for Loewy fans. Specifically, Avanti seduced celebrities such as the novelist Ian Fleming, the singer Frank Sinatra, the television presenter Johnny Carson or the actor Dick Van Dyke, among others. And his prototypes BMW 507 (1957) made by Pichón-Parat, the Lancia Flaminia ‘Loraymo’ (1959) or the Jaguar E with bodywork by Ghia set future trends while Loewy himself used them for personal use.
In the 1950s, Loewy lived between the United States and France. In the summer of 1986, on July 14, he died in Monaco.
Many criticized his dandyism, his opportunism, his passion for luxury, his extreme commercial sense, but today no one disputes the foresight and
its determining role in design development. He did not accept that form was entirely dictated by function, and he balanced the technical criteria with the aesthetics to achieve what he considered the best solution. Loewy made the design practice more attractive and thereby increased its prestige. Théophile Gautier had said: «There is no true beauty except in what is useless; everything useful is ugly, because it is the expression of a certain need and those of man are ignoble and unpleasant».
At the end of the 19th century, no one disputed that the beautiful was artistic and the industrial was ugly.
The fine arts had to be preserved for the serial object. But years later, Raymond Loewy…
Source: La Verdad
I am Mary Fitzgerald, a professional journalist and author of the Today Times Live. My specialty is in writing and reporting on technology-related topics. I have spent the last seven years extensively researching and understanding the field of technology so I can properly inform my readers about developments in this ever-evolving world.
