American Streamlined Design

The twentieth-century's fast cars, trains, and planes promised to conquer space and time; their aerodynamic styling and metallic bodies embodied a new and modern beauty that enchanted American designers from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Streamlining became popular for everything, including toy scooters, typewriters, power tools, teakettles, Coca-Cola bottles, Lucky Strike packaging, Fiestaware pitchers, Studebaker cars, Greyhound buses, and the 20th Century Limited train.

This book celebrates streamlining as epitomized by the work of Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey, Henri Dreyfuss, Russel Wright, and Norman Bel Geddes, and introduces other industrial designers, also highlighting the resurgence of streamlining among international vanguard designers from the 1980s to the present.

Patent drawings and period photographs demonstrate the usage of these dynamically styled objects. Two hundred objects drawn from the Eric Brill Collection (recently donated to the American Friends of Canada) and supplemented by the Stewart Collection of 20th Century Design were photographed for this book. A full bibliography, biographies of the designers, and index complete the study.