Norman Bel Geddes
Norman Bel Geddes was a prominent American designer and stage director, known for his significant contributions to both theater and industrial design in the early to mid-20th century. Born into a well-established family, he experienced a privileged upbringing that was disrupted by financial instability, leading him to take on various jobs to support his family from a young age. Geddes's artistic journey began with stage design, where he gained recognition for his innovative use of lighting and set design, which included pioneering the use of a single spotlight and creating a diagonal theater layout.
As he transitioned into industrial design, Geddes became a leader in streamlining, advocating for designs that were not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing. His work in this field included the design of household items, automobiles, and public spaces, with notable projects such as the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Geddes's belief in team collaboration and consumer-focused design helped shape modern industrial practices. Despite facing challenges in his later years, including financial mismanagement, his influence on design and theater remained notable, solidifying his legacy as a key figure in the evolution of American design. He passed away in 1958 in New York City.
Norman Bel Geddes
Theatrical Designer
- Born: April 27, 1893
- Birthplace: Adrian, Michigan
- Died: May 8, 1958
- Place of death: New York, New York
American industrial designer
With a remarkable ability to integrate many ideas into an organic whole, Geddes became one of the greatest stage designers of the twentieth century, as well as an industrial designer known as the founder of streamlining. He was also the first designer of the imaginative window displays that came to be expected by twentieth century shoppers.
Areas of achievement Art, theater and entertainment, business and industry
Early Life
Norman Bel Geddes (GEHD-ehs) was born into a prominent family. His grandfather, Norman, was a judge and the president of the Adrian College board of trustees. His mother, Flora Yingling Geddes, had attended college relatively rare for a woman in the nineteenth century and was a talented singer and pianist. Geddes’s early years were happy and privileged. As a college trustee, his grandfather entertained the important men of the day, and Geddes’s parents appreciated fine clothes, education, and culture. When young Geddes was four years old, his younger brother, Dudley, was born, and his grandfather died. For the next several years the family moved about, spending months at a time in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York before settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, Geddes’s father, Clifton, became director of the Pittsburgh Horse Show, and Flora earned a reputation as a hostess and music patron. Two years later the family fortune, invested in the stock market, was wiped out.
The family moved again, this time to a small apartment in Chicago, and Clifton took a job. Deprived of her piano and other entertainments, Flora became an avid museumgoer, taking her two sons with her and sharing her knowledge of painting and sculpture with them. When there was time and money, she took them to the theater. Norman found the theater exciting and spent hours planning how he might stage the stories he read in various children’s magazines.
Over the next few years, Geddes’s parents mostly lived apart. Clifton took jobs wherever he could find them. Flora and the children lived in a series of boardinghouses and relatives’ homes, and Flora gave piano lessons to earn money. When Geddes was thirteen, Clifton left the family for good, and Geddes began to take odd jobs wherever he could to help support his mother and brother. He delivered groceries, worked as a bellboy on a lake steamship, and eventually developed a moderately successful vaudeville act as Zedsky, the Boy Magician.
Always an undisciplined student, Geddes was often punished for drawing in the margins of his papers when he should have been working. He was finally expelled from ninth grade for drawing a caricature of one of his teachers on the blackboard. James Donahey, a nationally known cartoonist, heard of his expulsion and enrolled him in the Cleveland Institute of Art. After only three months in Cleveland, Geddes left to study at the Chicago Art Institute. Seven weeks later he met the Norwegian painter Hendrik Lund, who advised him to leave art school and make his own way.
Life’s Work
To support himself during his brief period as an art student, Geddes worked as a busboy in a restaurant and then as a custodian for the Chicago Opera Company. For a few weeks, he designed advertisements his first paid work as a designer but he found the salary of three dollars per week discouraging, and he turned to painting portraits. His career as a freelance artist taught him important lessons about art and about dealing with the wealthy, but commissions were scarce.
In 1914, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, and worked with the Peninsular Engraving Company, rising to art director in only six months. This was a steady position with good pay, and it gave Geddes time to indulge his real passion the theater. He began writing plays and planning how he would stage them, working through all the details in his head and in his notebooks. In 1915 he sold his first play, Thunderbird, to a Los Angeles theater company. By now he was devoting so much attention to his plays that his employers told him he must give up either his job or the theater. He had recently married Bel Schneider and taken her first name as part of his own. With a new wife and with no solid job prospects in the theater, Geddes nevertheless quit his job, moved to Los Angeles, and became a stage designer.
Geddes immediately revealed a real gift for stage design. In his first year he designed productions of plays by D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats, as well as plays of his own. He experimented with lighting and props and was the first designer to use a single spotlight directed on one actor, a technique that soon became widely used.
After a short and unsatisfying stint as an art director for silent films, Geddes picked up and moved again, thanks to a $400 gift from millionaire Otto Kahn. With his wife and infant son, the twenty-three-year-old Geddes went to New York and found work designing sets for the Metropolitan Opera. His sets were so innovative and every detail was so carefully integrated into the whole that he soon had his pick of assignments. Within three years he was the busiest designer in New York, creating spectacular scenery, costumes, and lighting designs for theatrical productions of all kinds, writing and directing plays, and even performing in them on occasion. He invented machinery to make new sound effects and even introduced a new floor plan for theaters, with the stage set in one corner and the auditorium set on a diagonal axis.
In 1927, Geddes reinvented himself again. While walking down fashionable Fifth Avenue in New York, he was struck by the dull window displays offered by the fanciest shops. He decided to turn his talent to department store windows and became the first designer of imaginative window displays. His interest in consumer goods grew, and at twenty-seven Geddes established a successful business designing clothing, furniture, and home decorating furnishings. In the theater, he had always enjoyed bringing technical knowledge to the solution of practical and aesthetic problems, and he found that he was able to bring the same kind of thinking and skill to the improvement of consumer goods. This led to his interest in the new field of industrial design and his second important career. He was among the first to persuade Americans that objects such as kitchen appliances and telephones could become works of art, functional as well as beautiful.
One of Geddes’s most successful industrial designs was for the 1932 SGE Oriole Stove. The stove included many features that were new at the time but were so obviously improvements that they became standard: an all-white, easy-to-clean surface with rounded corners and few dirt-catching seams, a storage area beneath the oven instead of tall legs and useless space, and plain and easy-to-clean chrome hardware. Geddes explained the thinking behind his designs in his widely read book Horizons (1932).
Geddes believed that for every machine or other object, from staplers to refrigerators to automobiles to gas stations, there was an ideal form that was efficient and beautiful without any need for ornamentation. For most things that moved through air, including large and small vehicles, the ideal shape resembled a teardrop, the most efficient shape in terms of aerodynamics. For his influential designs for automobiles, trains, and steamships based on this principle, Geddes became known as the founder of streamlining.
Another idea that Geddes brought from his theatrical experience was the value of a solid team of talented artists working together. For his new industrial design firm, he gathered a staff of a few dozen young designers, drafters, and technicians. Graduates from the top of their classes in the best engineering schools joined Geddes in his new endeavor, attracted by his name and reputation. The office included a drafting and design studio, a shop for building three-dimensional models, and even a print shop so that Geddes could control every step of a project from conception to the final proposal. For the first time, manufacturers sought out trained designers from outside their own firms. Geddes and his team were able to bring together the wishes of consumers, the ideas of manufacturers, and the demands of the manufacturing plants to create effective and beautiful products.
When members of the firm were not working on particular commissions, Geddes encouraged them to experiment and dream, designing on a grand scale with no consideration for cost. Geddes himself designed the famous Futurama exhibit for the General Motors Corporation at the New York World’s Fair (1939-1940), a vision of the way the world might appear in the year 1960. It included the most popular exhibit at the World’s Fair, Highways and Horizons, a model of an ideal urban-rural environment connected by superhighways focusing on the automobile as a great instrument of democracy and equality. Some of the ideas demonstrated in this exhibit were further explained in Geddes’s second book, Magic Motorways (1940), which is credited with influencing the modern American system of freeways and interchanges.
As Geddes grew older and more successful, his vision moved more and more from individual items to large systems. After World War II, he received fewer commissions but kept working on fanciful ideas that were never put into production. In the late 1940’s, his design firm closed, in part because of his own fiscal mismanagement. Throughout his industrial design years, he continued to work in the theater when interesting projects came up. His last projects included the design of television sets for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the first draft of an autobiography. He died in New York City on May 8, 1958.
Significance
Although always shy of the recognition that he founded streamlining, Geddes was one of the most influential industrial designers of the twentieth century. His independent firm was the first to offer commercial design services to manufacturers, and many of his innovations later became standard features.
During his lifetime, Geddes was perhaps best known as a stage designer. He provided scenery, costumes, and innovative lighting and sound effects for over two hundred plays and operas, including some of the most spectacular stage productions of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his innovations in the theater, including his use of the spotlight as the sole source of illumination on the stage and his design for a diagonal-axis theater, were widely adopted in the United States and abroad.
Bibliography
Bayley, Stephen. In Good Shape: Style in Industrial Products 1900 to 1960. New York: Van Nostrand, 1979. A general overview of the evolution of industrial design supported by many illustrations and original essays from Geddes and other designers. This volume presents a context for understanding some of Geddes’s most notable designs, including those for the Toledo counter scale (1929) and the Electrolux refrigerator (1934).
Bush, Donald J. The Streamlined Decade. New York: George Braziller, 1975. The story of the development of the streamlined form of functional design and the new profession of industrial designer between the stock market crash of 1929 and the World’s Fair of 1939. Geddes is one of four industrial designers whose work is analyzed and compared thoroughly in this volume.
Geddes, Norman Bel. Miracle in the Evening: An Autobiography. Edited by William Kelley. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Published after his death, this volume is the most complete source available for information about Geddes’s important work in the theater up to 1925, when the book ends. Geddes is modest about his achievements but offers fascinating detail about his life and career and ideas about theater production.
Himber, Charlotte. “All the World His Stage: Norman Bel Geddes.” In Famous in Their Twenties. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Based on an interview with Geddes, this story of his early accomplishments was originally published by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) as an inspiration to young boys. The revealing anecdotes focus on trial and error, overcoming obstacles, and perseverance.
Innes, Christopher. Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Examines how Geddes moved from stage design to the design of everyday items, including films, cars, and appliances, from the 1920’s through the 1950’s. Innes maintains that Geddes’s dramatic and modern designs created a new image of America and influenced designers worldwide.
Reid, Kenneth. “Masters of Design 2: Norman Bel Geddes.” Pencil Points 18 (January, 1937): 2-32. A brief biographical sketch and an analysis of the education and work experiences that led to Geddes’s prominence in the “two not wholly unrelated fields” of theater design and industrial design. Several illustrations of theatrical and industrial design are accompanied by expansive and insightful commentary.
Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century
1901-1940: 1919: German Artists Found the Bauhaus; 1922: First Major U.S. Shopping Center Opens; 1929: Loewy Pioneers American Industrial Design; 1937: Dreyfuss Designs the Bell 300 Telephone.
1941-1970: 1970: Design for the Real World Calls for Industrial Design Reform.