Robert Heller, Airflow Table Fan
Designed c.1937, Eric Brill Collection

"An object is streamlined when its exterior surface is so designed that upon passing through a fluid such as water or air the object creates the least disturbance in the fluid." – Norman Bel Geddes (1932)

In this world there is decoration and then there is design. We tend to use these words interchangeably, but they are actually very different ideas. Decoration focuses on issues of style and beauty, while design has more in common with engineering as it creates a solution to a problem. The history of design is an evolution of aesthetics, but the emergence of the Streamline Style during the 1930s was a new way of thinking.

The term Streamline refers to hydrodynamic (water) and aerodynamic (air) principles which emerged from the physics of fluid dynamics. A streamline (note the lowercase “s”) is an arc of flow, like the air passing over the top of a car in motion. Streamline, the style, emerged from the design of airplanes, automobiles and marine vessels. It was originally an effect of function that became popularized as it was applied to objects such as pencil sharpeners and breadboxes – objects which do not move.

Streamline vs. Art Deco

People often use these terms synonymously but that is not correct. Art Deco is concerned with upward motion, such as the rise of a skyscraper where the lines run uninterrupted from the ground to the top. It is often embellished with angular geometric details. Streamline, in contrast, is rounded and curved. A Streamline building has bands that wrap around it in a horizontal fashion and looks as if it would allow wind to flow smoothly around it.

In the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York is presenting “American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow.” The exhibition features 180 objects that include furniture, ceramics, metalwork, plastic and graphic design, as well as original drawings and book designs. It provides a fresh appraisal of the subject and showcases the achievements of the best-known Streamline exponents – Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague – along with the

Sterling Streamline Iron Designed c. 1930-40, Eric Brill Collection

Kem Weber, Lounge Chair, designed 1934 The Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection

Harold L. Van Doren, John Gordon Rideout Skippy-Racer Scooter, designed c. 1933, Eric Brill Collection

contributions of lesser-known but significant designers such as Lurell E. Guild, Clifford Brooks Stevens, Harold Van Doren, as well as newly such discovered practitioners as John R. Morgan, William B. Petzold and Louis Vavrik.

The exhibition posits that the streamlining of the 1930s is properly understood as a unique stylistic expression. Criticized as early as 1932 by modernists, the idiom evolved in defiance of both Art Deco and functionalist modernism. Objects celebrated today as design icons came in for explicit criticism in the 1944 catalogue for The Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Design for Use, with these words: "The desire to make objects look ‘up-to-date’ by borrowing forms from unrelated modern machinery often leads to absurdities such as this pencil sharpener streamlined to resemble an airplane."

Says exhibit curator David A. Hanks, "Perhaps a core difference in how American scholars received art deco and Bauhaus functionalism, and how they regarded streamlining, lies in the fact that the former arose from an artistic vanguard, while streamlining aimed at the widest possible public and was based on an admiration for industry and speed.” Supporting this case are products ranging from a humble computer card hole-puncher, roasting pan and chrome-plated iron to a lounge chair created of welded tubular steel and leather, boldly canted as if straining into the future. Although this armchair would look perfectly at home on the deck of an ocean liner, its daring simplification of line belies the engineering bravura of its California designer, Kem Weber.

The accompanying catalogue is published by Flammarion, Inc. It offers a scholarly account of the history of streamlining from the 1930s to the present, chronicles the social and stylistic thought of the period, and provides detailed analyses of all the objects featured in the exhibition. The 280-page book, which is available in English and French editions, features 400 illustrations with essays by Hanks and Anne Hoy, Adjunct Associate Professor, New York University.