The Utopian Home: Buckminster Fuller s ( ) Dymaxion House

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1 Desma 10 Design Culture - an Introduction Meeting 6 (Nov.2,2007) Design, Consumers, Corporations American Home Design 1930s - - Streamlining used, but lost its original function (became more ornamental, a symbolic manifestation of the machine age). - American Style : curvilinear forms; influenced by boats and aeroplanes (round windows, chrome surfaces, metal railings). - Criticized as being merely re-packaging of the conventional house, rather than as something genuinely new. -Idea to mass-produce houses like Fords ; early efforts began in the 30s (General Houses, Motohomes). Little success at first. - William Levitt s Levittown -idea: cheap mass-produced homes for suburbian living. Great success (a breakthrough)! A dream house is a house the buyer and his family will want to live in a long time an electric kitchen-laundry is the one big item that gives the homeowner all the advantages and conveniences that make his home truly livable. (William Lewitt) - Eventually focus shifts from the house to consumer goods: American s did not want machines to live in; they wanted machines to live with (Brian Horrigan). - After the Second World War (1945-) emphasis of design culture begins to shift on consumer items kept and used inside the one family house. The private car becomes an extension of the home, a mobile mediator between the home, the workplace, the shopping mall, and the drive-in cinema. The Utopian Home: Buckminster Fuller s ( ) Dymaxion House - Fuller was a visionary thinker, designer, and architect. Background: self-taught engineer. Published numerous books. - Dymaxion (dynamic+maximum) House (originally called 4-D Utility Unit ), introduced as a publicly displayed model in Created a sensation. - Not just a machine for living in the style of Le Corbusier; a complete model for living : housing unit + transport unit. Much more radical that the modernist houses proposed by the European modernists. - Total re-definition of the house. Creative and functional use of new materials: duraluminium, rubber, plastic - The home should be movable, mobile, adaptable: it could be delivered by zeppelins! It should be possible to stack the individual units into towers. - Fuller understood design problems to be global; he searched for all-embracing solutions and principles.

2 - Fuller searched for pure forms. In 1954 he patented the Geodesic Dome. Based on natural polyhedral forms; like a crystal, a flower, a skeleton ; hundreds built, often used for world s fair pavillions. Features of American Industrial Design - Rejection of European functionalism - Negative aspects: intellectual break from the rest of the world, isolation - Positive aspects: independence that left room for innovation - Design defended as anti-elitist, something for the masses - Commitment on style: the use of simple body shells to hide mechanical complexity; streamlining became pseudo-functional - Borax style: flashy, bulbous, modernistic design - household gadgets with bulbous corners, chrome strips, plastic strips Design for Consumption -New consumer market opened after World War II -Contributing factors: economic growth, baby boomer generation, emphasis on the nuclear family, suburban lifestyle as an ideal (one family house + automobile) -Focus on consumer items as symbolic tokens of the new life style. Television set became one of the design symbols of the era. -Symbols: Kitchen of Tomorrow, TV Set, Dream Cars -Shopping malls, drive-in theaters, Disneyland (Opened on August 17, 1955-). These served the new lifestyle. Design Everywhere - Design has to be present in everything: from a lipstick to a steamship, from a paper-clip to a locomotive, from an ash-tray to a model industrial community - Growing concern for corporate design and product identity. - Design is one of the gears in a train that also includes management, sales promotion, advertising, engineering and research. (Harold van Doren and Walter Dorwin Teague: Design This Day, 1940)

3 The Consumer as the Product of Design - According to design historian Bevis Hillier, design is not just about creating products. It is also about designing a consumer for the product. Human personalities are shaped by social conditions, from ideals of family life and norms of gender behavior to the economic opportunities available to people based on their cultural identities. The self is, to some degree, a manufactured object, a social product. (Ellen Lupton) New Design Issues in the 1950s and 60s - Automation, first experienced in industrial production ( the automated factory meant industrial robots that were controlled by computers working on the assembly line, instead of humans), penetrates the home in the form of the fashionable automated gadgets. Typical example: programmable automatic washing machine. The Wonder kitchen that seems to cook by itself another manifestation of automation. Automation penetrates the home via the kitchen; points towards the ideal of the smart house! - Drive-in emerges as a design idea: hamburger restaurants, drive-in movie theatres, shopping malls. This reflected the centrality of the automobile as an element of the new lifestyle, a mobile extension of the home. -The emergence of new youth cultures becomes a challenge for design, and a promise of a new market. Examples: rock n roll and pop: pinball; taming the youth rebellion into a consumer lifestyle a challenge for the industry and marketing machineries (the transformation of the public image of Elvis Presley a famous example: from a rebel into an idol for the bourgeois family). - Mobile design: transistor radios, portable TV sets, mopeds and scooters. These were often targeted to young customer, who wanted to espace from the family home with their friends. Corporate Branding of Products An early classic: Peter Behrens ( )

4 Pioneer of corporate design, became artistic advisor for AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft, Germany) in First task: to design new logo for the company. Created pioneering standardized and rationalized products: electric kettles with interchangeable parts, electric clocks, etc. Everything had to be associated with AEG, this included the re-design of the sales catalogues and the promotional material. Corporate Identity and Consumerism - An increasingly important concern in the design culture after the Second World War. -A corporation has to have a uniform appearance that appears in all its manifestations. -All products by a corporation must have a recognizable identity from micro to macro levels. -Pioneers in creating corporate identity: Braun, Olivetti, IBM... Some classics of Corporate Design -Dieter Rams: chief designer of Braun A.G. (Germany), Task to create corporate identity. Less, but better. -Eliot Noyes: worked with Gropius and Marcel Breuer in the 1930s, director of industrial design at MOMA. Became design consultant at IBM in Redesigned IBM s corporate identity: pervaded everything from buildings to graphic design and products. Design linked to technical innovations (Selectric Typewriter, 1961). Invited Paul Rand to work on the graphic identity. Rand became a classic logo designer. -Olivetti: an early pioneer in corporate design; star designers in 1950s and 60s included Ettore Sottsass, Mario Bellini: exercising yoga on design: stripping from it every attribute, sex-appeal, deception. Braun as an example of corporate Design -Braun company (Germany) was a pioneer of corporate design -New aesthetics for domestic kitchen appliances created in the 1950s -One principle: domestic gadgets must be visually distinct from office or factory

5 equipment; still, everything produced by the company have to be immediately recognizable as Braun. products must semiotically reflect and other aspect of the company s identity. -Austere, simple style was chosen: timeless, immediately recognizable. -Design department in Dieter Rams became chief designer in 1960 and was to a great extentg responsible for braun s identity. Dieter Rams: Omit the Unimportant - One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important. Good design means as little design as possible. - Every manufactured item sends out signals to the mind or emotions. These signals - strong or weak, wanted or unwanted, clear or hidden - create feelings. But the most important factor is whether the item can communicate its use. - Much design today is modish sensation and the rapid change of fashion outdates products quickly. For me there is only one way: discipline. Paul Rand: sayings Ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting The key to good design is taking the essence of something that is already there and enhancing its meaning by putting it into a form everyone can identify with. Classic example of the power of corporate design Classic example of the power of design: the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, late 1950s (designed by GK Design consultancy). This was a new kind of a table bottle that was also stylish. Earlier soy sauce had been poured to a dedicated dish to be served. This was no longer necessary. The new bottle design contributed significantly to the company s growth and lasting global success.