Jeffrey L. Meikle

Digital_Humanities, by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp

Chapter five provides a long discussion of household goods, including a lengthy examination of S&H Green savings stamps, in which Harris suggests that modernism was considered by consumers to be “feminine, European, elitist, and Jewish” (174). Chapter six, “Built-Ins and Closets,” contributes the notion that “since clutter was associated with lower-class, ethnic identities” (192), domestic storage systems were expressions of race. However, Harris’s assertion that “Working-class women took pride in displaying their new appliances, whereas middle-class women preferred to conceal them” (201) merges class and race, thereby denying the existence of a nonwhite middle class in a consequently generalized, rather than historically accurate, account. The final chapter examines the domestic, non-productive garden as a “cipher for middleand upper-middle-class white identities” (295), maintained by “typically nonwhite and working-class” labor until power tools effaced labor into leisure (298). Harris’s fleeting discussion of African-American consumption practices refers to Karyn Lacy’s work in establishing that “the residents of black suburbs today pay close attention to lawn maintenance as a key measure that distinguishes them from blacks of lower economic classes” (297). Harris then uses Steven Dubin’s work in a discussion of diminutive “Black Sambo” lawn sprinklers (300–1) as symbols of racial superiority. Ultimately, by consulting solely mainstream media sources, which depict only white families and normative domestic practices, Harris has excluded representations of an ethnically diverse postwar American society. Rather than analyzing Ebony (founded 1945), for example, and other publications which told a different story, Harris has produced a book that itself is characterized by whiteness.

Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics Along America's Commercial Corridors by Martin Treu (review)

672 lyn, and the numerous municipalities across the harbor in New Jersey” (p. 41). Schlichting’s recounting of the resulting complexity not only conveys the enormity of the problems that Wilgus sought to solve, but provides key insight into the financial and political forces that repeatedly thwarted so many of his plans, undermined the railroads, and fueled the decline of New York City’s port. If Schlichting’s book has a shortcoming, it is a hesitancy to explore more fully the reasons behind Wilgus’s failures and his absence from accounts of achievements like Grand Central and the Port Authority. Certainly, as he argues, parochialism and the shortsighted self-interest of politicians and railroad executives played a considerable part. But what of Wilgus himself? Despite Schlichting’s admiration, the engineer does not emerge as a wholly likeable figure; in many instances, he appears to be cold, proud, and insecure. (As Schlichting notes, Wilgus’s unpublished autobiography makes no mention of his wife and children, but includes appendixes of professional testimonials and letters of appreciation.) Perhaps brilliance was not enough to tackle the problems that Wilgus dreamed of solving; and yet, it is impossible to ignore Schlichting’s positive assessment of Wilgus’s life and work: “Stand in the magnificent Grand Concourse at 42nd Street in the heart of Grand Central, and the question is answered” (p. 256).

Designing the Machine Age in America: Streamlining in the 20th Century

Streamlining, the major U.S. commercial design style of the 1930s, was promoted by industrial designers who sought to eliminate sales resistance just as aerodynamic streamlining was intended to eliminate wind resistance. Popularized in 1934 by two passenger trains, the Union Pacific railroad`s M-10,000 and the Burlington railroad`s Zephyr, the style was introduced into the automotive market through the Chrysler Airflow and was quickly incorporated into non-vehicular consumer products. While 1930s streamlining expressed a cultural desire for stability and stasis during the Great Depression, the postwar variant, exemplified by the sharply angled, flaring automotive tailfin, expressed a popular faith in limitless technological progress. The architect Eero Saarinen, who had learned streamlining in the industrial design office of Norman Bel Geddes in the late 1930s, brought postwar streamlining to full expression in such projects as the TWA terminal in New York and Dulles airport in northern Virginia. During the 1990s a nostalgic retro mode of streamlining appeared in such products as the New Beetle automobile, the first Apple iMac computer, and the Smart car.

Aluminum by Design [Review Article]

Adding to the many definitions of design proposed over the past two centuries, one might suggest that design is the intentional ordering of materials in the service of everyday life. At the very least, it seems a truism that materials are the stuff of design. As if emphasizing that point, early twentieth-century modernists often insisted that valid design must express “truth to materials.” Their concept of authenticity rejected such practices as painting wooden panels to look like marble and casting iron into the forms of living vines and tendrils. In utopian moments both Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson looked forward to new artificial materials whose scientific rationalism, they believed, would promote an agenda of pure modernism. However, whenever inventors and engineers have made available such new materials, designers and architects have been hard pressed to define exactly which forms, textures, and colors express their true natures. Such materials as stone and wood, copper and gold, resonate with long traditions of human use, but new materials carry no traditional associations and may often be shaped to create a disconcerting array of visual and tactile effects. Sometimes new materials are made to imitate old ones either because they directly substitute for them, as when celluloid replaced ivory and tortoiseshell combs in the late nineteenth century, or because consumers seek the comfort and status of the familiar, as in the case of wood-grained polyurethane television consoles in the late twentieth. Unlike inventors and visionary designers, most manufacturers and consumers do not easily recognize the value of new materials. To gain success in the marketplace, they must be imaginatively defined and vigorously promoted—a difficult process in which conflicting forms often reflect quite different functional applications and aesthetic intentions. Such issues engage the authors of the essays in Aluminum by Design, an intellectually stimulating, lavishly illustrated catalogue accompanying a major exhibition that will travel from the Carnegie Museum of Art to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Design Museum in London. Although aluminum is the most prevalent metallic element on earth, no techniques for refining more than tiny amounts of it existed before 1886, when Charles Martin Hall in the United States and Paul Héroult in France independently and simultaneously devised an electrolytic process that is still in use today. As aluminum’s price fell from prohibitive to

Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design.

12 per pound in 1886 and 36¢ in 1897, designers and architects gained a tantalizing new material, one whose uncertain identity remained mutable throughout the twentieth century. Never losing sight of the central question of how it is that entrepreneurs, manufacturers, designers, promoters, and consumers negotiate varying, often conflicting, definitions of a new material, the authors contribute a more coherent narrative than such collections of essays often provide. This sense of unity, of parts making up a greater whole, was clearly a prime objective of Sarah Nichols, the curator of the exhibition, as she edited the catalogue. Her introductory essay offers a general historical survey of the development and uses of aluminum. She highlights the industry’s promotion of the new material as something unprecedented, indeed almost miraculous, with its properties of light weight, durability, chemical inertness, high conductivity, ease of fabrication, and potential for assuming bright anodized colors. Nichols emphasizes the central role of designers in conceiving new applications for aluminum, as portrayed, for example, in an Alcoa advertising campaign in the 1950s that featured the work of Charles and Ray Eames, Eliot Noyes, Marianne Strengell, Harley Earl, and others. The nineteenth-century development of aluminum is described by Robert Friedel, a historian of technology who has previously written on invention and the commercialization of new materials. He begins dramatically with William Frishmuth, a German emigré chemist who startled observers in 1884 by successfully providing the Washington Monument with an aluminum capstone, a pyramid less than nine inches high, cast with overwhelming difficulty from a metal so rare that its use was then confined to expensive jewelry. As the electrolytic process of 1886 made aluminum available for a variety of democratized applications, according to Friedel, its promoters emphasized that it shared the highest qualities of rare metals but was as common as the clay from which its ore derived. He situates aluminum in the era’s ideology of material progress, according to which it afforded yet another example, like such plastics as celluloid and later Bakelite, of nature mastered and put to work in the service of humanity. Friedel’s essay concludes at the end of the nineteenth century with warehouses filling all too quickly with aluminum bars, an inexpensive new material in need of vigorous promotion. In the following two essays, Dennis P. Doordan and Penny Sparke, who are historians respectively of architecture and design, trace the evolution of aluminum as a material of construction and manufacture during the

Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change

List of Illustrations (21) Preface 1. The Aesthetics of Fordism 2. Early Development of the Automotive Form 3. Diverging Paths of Design: Mass and Class Production 4. The Struggle for Styling, 1: The Twenties and the Birth of Automobile Styling 5. The Struggle for Styling, 2: The Depression and the Decade of Streamlining 6. Fifties Fins and the Triumph of Fantastic Styling 7. The Rise and Fall of Auto Individuality Epilogue. Design in the Wake of Fordism Notes

American Plastic: A Cultural History

King of the road - the social construction of the safety bicycle the fourth kingdom - the social construction of bakelite the majesty of daylight - the social construction of fluorescent lighting conclusion - the politics of sociotechnical change.