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He looked over models of the interiors of three new ocean liners for American President Lines, hurried on to pick up a new bottle for Lever Bros. Loewy thought it would be nice to put some kind of shock absorber on the bottom ("The clash of glass against a sink isn't good"). From his pocket he whipped out his hasty design for the tube-top made as a suction cup (to hold the tube against the wall while in use). "Make one up and I'll try it at home for a week or two," he said.
Loewy stopped to look ruefully at the flat lettering on a new ice-cream package. "It's for home freezer units," he protested, "where there isn't much light. The brand name has to jump right out at you." Grabbing scissors and glossy, colored paper, he snipped out a design, slapped the brand lettering against it and held it up: the name jumped out, all right.
Designer Loewy, who likes good food, but likes a trim figure better (he keeps his weight close to 170 by diet and massage), worked on through the lunch hour, pausing only for an apple and saccharin-sweetened coffee. Then, in & out of workrooms again, he stopped by a drafting board littered with new tiepin designs, picked up a pencil and drew an arrowhead and part of the shaft. "Work some up like this in gold, or black−or maybe burgundy," he said in the tone of a suggestion. "Men seem to like burgundy." At the blueprints for a power-wheel for bicycles for the American Brake Shoe Co., Loewy commented: "Much too heavy." On his way out he stumbled over some outdoor cooking grills that a new customer had brought in for redesign. Looking at the clumsy grills with ill-concealed horror, he murmured: "Terrible! Terrible!" and rushed off for a rubdown and massage at the New York Athletic Club. The Sleeping Beauty. As the biggest industrial designer in the U.S., Raymond Fernand Loewy, at 56, is the dominant figure in a field which in less than a quarter-century has mushroomed from a groping, uncertain experiment into a major phenomenon of U.S. business. Design has existed since man made the first wheel, but the Machine Age, concerned at first only with spewing forth its myriad products in increasing quantity, was slow in discovering the need for form. As early as 1904 Frank Lloyd Wright was singing the beauties of the machine. As he later put it:
Now, a chair is a machine to sit in.
A home is a machine to live in.
The human body is a machine to be
worked by will.
A tree is a machine to bear fruit. A plant is a machine to bear flowers
and seeds. And . . . a heart is a suction-pump.
Does that idea thrill you?
Not until the late '203 did Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes−industrial design's greatest prophet and visionary−and a handful of pioneers, including Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, Harold Van Doren, Lurelle Guild, thrill the industrial world with an art for the Machine Age.