Raymond Loewy made the mid-century modern

January 25, 2008|Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent

LEXINGTON - In "Diamonds Are Forever," the 1956 James Bond novel, CIA man turned private detective Felix Leiter sings the praises of his custom Studebaker to his pal 007: "Designed by that Frenchman, Raymond Loewy. Best designer in the world." Leiter and Bond were author Ian Fleming's fictions, but Loewy was quite real - even if Leiter's description of him was a bit of an exaggeration.

The exhibit "Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture" at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington shows that in addition to making Studebakers super-spy cool, Loewy's firm helped fashion snappy mid-century modern Frigidaire and Sears refrigerators, Lord & Taylor and Macy's shops, and Greyhound buses. They designed Coca-Cola packaging, the interior of the supersonic Concorde jetliner, NASA's Skylab space station, and in 1962 the blue and white exterior graphics for Air Force One. But Loewy is perhaps most identified with the streamlined look, inspired by the teardrop shape of airplanes, that became all the rage during the Great Depression.

Loewy (1893-1986) was born in France, immigrated to New York in 1919, and found success as an advertising illustrator before he became, in the late 1920s, one of the pioneers of the field of industrial design. These men were generally consultants who dreamed up the look and shape of things and left it to manufacturers' engineers to figure out how to make the stuff work. Loewy argued that good design could improve anything, even, say, dentists' chairs. "Why not suffer in comfort?" he quipped.

Industrial design blossomed with the rise of mass produc tion, the electrification of homes (to power the mass-produced devices), and planned obsolescence, an idea that originated when US auto makers adopted regular - and mainly superficial - design changes to seed consumer demand in the 1920s as they reached market saturation with their vehicles. Seeing the tactic's success, and hoping to turn around declining sales during the Depression, other industries also adopted the frequently new-and-improved formula.

Loewy and his team were expert at making things appear seductively fresh and of the moment. A 1930 art deco "Westinghouse skyscraper clock radio" is a sleek, stately 5-foot-tall square mahogany pillar in the shape of a skyscraper, with a clock face at the top and a hidden radio speaker and dials. Form doesn't follow function, but instead masks the mechanics under a dream of progress and futuristic machine luxury.