[Racerbvd]

Great picture I recently wrote about him

🚐 Norman Bel Geddes was an American visionary who had an early role in shaping a streamlined futuristic world. He is one of America’s first industrial designers, opening his studio in 1927 and is credited for coining the phrase streamline. His vision for the world was one utopian future, a Disneyland Fantasyland, one of streamlined trains,
and flying cars, he named Futurama. He designed a wide range of commercial products, from rounded metal furniture, chrome cocktail shakers, ergonomical reclining chairs, Art Deco plastic radios, aerodynamic automobiles and superhero futuristic looking airplanes. His work caught the eye of Walter P. Chrysler, who in 1933 commissioned Bel Geddes to help redesign the Chrysler Airflow, the first mass produced streamlined car in the world. He also designed futuristic filling stations and unibody gasoline trucks for both Texaco and Shell Oil (see the pictures below) At his studio he employed some of the top creative people of his day, including Raymond Loewy, Eliot Noyes and Henry Dreyfuss . These three, and several other students eventually moved on after WWII becoming some of the most creative industrial designers during the era of Mid Century Modern Design, but getting their start with Bel Geddes.

▪️He started his career in theatre production, working in Los Angeles as a set designer in 1916. He then moved on to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and Lincoln Center. He worked with the legendary Max Reinhardt where he assembled incredibly large scale theatre sets for for big production operas, overseeing an amazing amount of details. Throughout his career he collaborated with top designers who commented on the meticulous science in his draftsmanship drawings to convey his ideas. Bel Geddes is the author of 2 books, Horizons and Magic Motorways, where in both books he describes how important “large concept thinking” is just as important as real world design. He wrote in his book Horizons “Man has one major failing. He limits his imagination to what his eyes can see”.

▪️Some of his larger ideas include a round performance arts theater where a rotating auditorium moves and the center stage remains stationary. Rotating the audience after each act, the building eventually makes an its way fully around in a circle, stopping four times, a quarter way through for a four act play. Although funding for such an enormous endeavor never came about, but his notebooks had the architectural drawings and engineering completely worked out (see the 3rd video below). He also reimagined the automobile as a teardrop shaped designed made of silverish chrome with 6 wheels, 2 in the front and 4 in the back. The solo driver who sits in a cockpit like compartment sits alone upfront. The very fast engine is in the rear, travels at record speeds, and holds 8 passengers is in a vehicle with a shape unlike anything ever imagined.

▪️My favorite design of his is a modern V shaped airplane, that was both an ocean liner, and commercial jet (see the picture in the collage). This airplane-boat had nine decks, an orchestra hall and enormous formal dinning rooms. Like his theater, the V shaped flying cruise ship was never built. However in the late 1930s the Boeing company called upon him to help design the Pan American 314 Clipper, a giant airplane that landed on the water similar to his flying cruise ship idea. Boeing built 3 amphibious airplanes where passengers could freely walk around, eat in a dinning room, relax in lounge chairs on the observation deck. Passengers slept in beds at their sleeping quarters, and was like a cruise ship in the air. These incredible Clipper airplanes built during the Art Deco Era flew to Europe, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, and China by in the late 1930s.

▪️During this time most people traveled across country by passenger trains. The depression era roads were poorly maintained, and often meandered throughout the country, illustrated in the Pixar movie Cars. The Eisenhower era National Highways were many years away, and with an unpredictable amount of filling stations, and overnight hotels, most people relied heavily on the railway system to get across the country. General Motors knew that if people had a national highway they would buy more cars. So in 1939 GM once again called upon Bel Geddes to build an enormously large exhibition at the New York’s world’s fair showing visitors a glimpse of what transportation would look like 30 years into the future.

▪️Named Futurama, it showcased a streamlined highway system with modern roads connecting to cities with rooftop helicopter pads on top of skyscrapers, and suburban homes, some with large garages to store their flying cars. It was the scale of what a small a model train would be, only with highways and tiny moving automobiles. This enormous room was a third of a mile long with hundreds of feet of a to scale highway system with 50 thousand vehicles, 10 thousand of them were moving. It had an astonishing 500 thousand tiny buildings and over a million trees. It was the largest exhibit like this ever built. It was a bit like a Disneyland type ride where visitors moved along a conveyor belt, passing along a large glass wall and peering into an enormous room full of the tiny futuristic models. This very popular exhibit ran for over a year with 30,000 people a day visiting it, making it the most popular attraction of any modern world’s fair. Walt Disney would take many of its inspired ideas for his Tomorrowland’s section of Disneyland opening up almost 2 decades later.

▪️With so many imaginative projects spanning over many years there hasn’t been a exhibition of his collective work until now. Donald Albrecht, curator of the Architectural and Design Museum of New York has put together the first complete exhibit of Bel Geddes named I have seen the future.

🔺Click on the link below to learn about the first Bel Geddes exhibition of it’s kind. Also a second in-depth video about the GM exhibition at the world’s fair. And if you can spare a little time be sure to see the 3rd link of a college lecture on Bel Geddes done by professor Mathew Bird from the Rhode Island School of Design. This online lecture is usually for students paying tuition for the class, but was recently made available free online, and is really worth your time. ~ Also check out the comments for more pictures, and while you are there please leave a message I like your feedback.

🔸Trivia ~ Norman Bel Geddes’ daughter, Barbara Bel Geddes, became an actress and played Miss Ellie Ewing on the 80s TV show Dallas.

🔺Click on the links below
▪️Exhibition
https://youtu.be/GoAdcujfo3A
▪️World’s Fair
https://youtu.be/aMSp4d2rOzE
A longer but great lecture
▪️Online Lecture
https://youtu.be/uymXWa89Ylo