Posted
4/23/2006 11:09:00 AM
by Douglas
And interesting look at the history of design and the use of
streamlining.In the catalog for the "American Modern" show at the Metropolitan Museum in 2000, J. Stewart Johnson, its curator, took issue with 30's designers who "began to apply streamlining to all sorts of objects — not only to locomotives, where it made sense, but to vacuum cleaners, where it did not." A section of his show was devoted to streamlining more or less as a subset of American Modernism.
The difference in how scholars regarded Art Deco and Bauhaus functionalism versus how they saw streamlining, says David A. Hanks, curator of the Program for Modern Design, stemmed from the former's genesis in the avant-garde, "while streamlining aimed at the widest possible public and was based on an admiration for industry and speed."
It's always be intriguing to see what past generations considered "futuristic." I'm still waiting for my hover car.