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Reviews
| Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. By Glenn Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press and Milwaukee Art Museum, 2003. xi+219 pp., 250 b&w and color illus., notes, appendices, bibl., index. $45 hb (ISBN 0-262-01207-3).
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In 1997, the Milwaukee Art Museum arranged for Glenn Adamson to curate an exhibition on the life and work of Milwaukee industrial designer Brooks Stevens. This book flows from Adamson's curatorial efforts and brings the subject of the exhibit to the attention of a wider audience.
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Brooks Stevens certainly deserves the spotlight that is directed upon his work here. He was a member of the original generation of industrial designers (including Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy) who began to shape the appearance of industrial and consumer products in the 1930s, and he was selected as one of the 10 charter members at the founding of the Society of Industrial Designers in 1944. Adamson shows that Stevens, who coined the term "planned obsolescence," exhibited the flamboyance typical of many of the founders of his profession. Stevens also differed significantly from the other famous—and occasionally infamous—designers who have been the subjects of studies by historians Jeffrey Meikle, Arthur Pulos, and Glenn Porter. Stevens's formal training came in architecture (Cornell 1933) rather than in stage design or advertising. Perhaps more significant, he was the only major designer not located in New York, choosing to remain in Milwaukee throughout his career. This beautifully designed book does a fine job of telling the story of this "underappreciated" member of the industrial design fraternity (p. x).
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Adamson's book presents information about the life and work of Stevens in several ways. It opens with three independently authored essays that examine his career in general, what his work tells us about the domestic sphere in America in the mid-20th century, and what Stevens's industrial designs reveal about American values. The bulk of the text is formed by several chapters authored by Adamson that provide an overview of Stevens's life and the development of his firm. Also included are excerpts from articles and speeches, some interspersed in the text, others (several short papers or articles) reproduced in an appendix. Interwoven in the text are superbly researched and intricately detailed examinations of many of Stevens's designs, accompanied by wonderful illustrations, an essential feature of a book such as this.
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The designs are the most stunning part of the book. During his career, Stevens's firm executed some 3,000 designs for more than 600 clients, many of them from the long list of manufacturers who formed the deep and varied industrial and economic base of Milwaukee. Some of the designs are highly recognizable; a few were important and even pacesetting; many reflect the industrial zenith of Milwaukee. Readers will inevitably find their own favorites, given the range of products on which Stevens and his staff of designers, engineers, and model builders worked. They include his first peanut butter jar (1934) and early work for the machine shops of the city, as well as streamlined vehicles from the 1930s. A lifelong car enthusiast, Stevens designed Jeeps for Willys Overland after 1945, made models for Kaiser in the late 1940s, and worked for American Motors and Studebaker in the 1960s. He also designed numerous racing cars, including for his own racing teams. He undertook numerous contracts for Evinrude outboard motors. Adamson considers his most spectacular design to be the complete conception of the Olympian Hiawatha diesel streamliner for the Milwaukee Road (Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad) in 1947. Indeed, every important industrial designer seems to have designed at least one streamlined train! Stevens's firm handled a few building designs, as well as cookware for Mirro and products for Lawnboy. More impressively, Stevens oversaw the re-design of packaging across the entire 3M product line after that firm commissioned a new logo in the early 1960s. He also produced the red-and-white soft cross logo for Miller Brewing in 1953. Perhaps most visibly, Stevens redesigned the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile in 1958, at the same time renaming the vehicle that had first been introduced in 1936.
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| This volume constitutes a strong addition to the growing literature on industrial design and industrial designers, whose contribution to material culture is increasingly evident in the historical literature. Not only well researched, the book also offers the visual information required to appreciate Brook Stevens's significance as one of the leading industrial designers and a shaper of America's 20th-century industrial history. |
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