Shaping the Modern American Lifestyle

 

QUESTION: For the last several years I’ve begun to purchase various pieces of Mid-Century Modern furniture and accessories. While doing so, the name Russel Wright has come up frequently. I understand he was one of the more influential industrial designers of the 20th century. I’d like to learn more about him and his designs, so that I can be on the lookout for them as I browse thrift shops and used furniture stores. What can you tell me about Wright and his designs?

ANSWER: Russel Wright was indeed a master of modern design. He created dinnerware, glasses, spun aluminum, wooden tableware, stainless steel flatware, textiles, and furniture, giving a sense of style to the modern American home. Wright was one of the premier industrial designers of the modern era.

He first began to work in silver and chrome, creating small decorative circus animals for gift shops. His later work in chrome came after he signed a contract to design for Chase Brass & Copper, which he did from 1935 to 1946. Wright's designs for Chase are hot marked with his name.

Wright’s early gift items were expensive, and being in the midst of the Great Depression, he found it necessary to develop items that were more affordable. So he instead turned to spun aluminum, actually manufacturing items in the basement of he and his wife’s home.  He created around a 100 items, including stove-to-table items, a concept which doesn’t work well in aluminum but which was later expressed in other materials. Wright combined aluminum with wood, rattan, or cork, enabling the resulting pieces to be combined in a variety of ways.

From aluminum Wright moved on in 1935 to create the Oceanic line of woodenware for Elise Wood Working Company. For these designs, he used naturalistic the forms of leaves, snail spirals, starfish, and water ripples. Even though they were all machine made, these products had a handmade look and feel.

Wright's first furniture designs, for Heywood-Wakefield in 1934, made use of curved veneers and looked more Art Deco than his later furniture. Unfortunately, these pieces didn’t sell well and weren’t durable enough to use constantly. But they showed Wright's early interest in open stock pieces that could be used in a variety of ways.

The breakthrough in furniture design for Wright came with his introduction of American Modern, a line manufactured in American rock maple by Conant Ball, which sold the pieces in both dark and "blonde" finishes. Wright’s wife, Mary, coined the name "American Modern," which was later used for other products for the home. Macy's was so enthusiastic about the furniture line that they constructed a nine-room house in their New York store to display the furniture in room settings.

Wright also worked with the Old Hickory Furniture Company in Martinsville, Indiana on unique rustic furniture featuring his modern stylings. The Old Hickory line first appeared in 1942 and some of the designs stayed popular through the 1950s.

In 1939, Wright introduced a colorful line of American Modern china, the most widely sold American ceramic dinnerware in the country’s history, made by Steubenville Pottery, of Steubenville, Ohio. But American Modem china was low-tired, thus subject to chipping and crazing. After World War II, Wright introduced Iroquois Casual China, made with a high-fired glaze, suitable for dishwasher use, that came with a three-year guarantee. 

He followed his successful china line with glasses, flatware and textiles. This was the beginning of Wright’s American lifestyle, as he offered consumers a way to create a comfortable home with a unified look as they put it together, piece by piece. American Modern china, in production from 1939 until 1959, was the country’s all-time biggest selling line of dishes.

In addition to ceramic dinnerware, Wright also designed several popular lines of Melmac melamine resin plastic dinnerware for the home and did early research on plastic Melmac dinnerware for restaurant use. Beginning in 1953, Northern Plastic Company of Boston began production of his first Melmac line of plastic dinnerware for the home, called "Residential."  

As with his ceramic dinnerware, Wright began designing his Melmac only in solid colors, but by the end of the 1950s created several patterns ornamented with decoration, usually depicting plant forms.

Wright's approach to design came from the belief that the dining table was the center of the home. Working outward from there, he designed tableware to larger furniture, architecture to landscaping, all fostering an easy, informal lifestyle. It was through his popular and widely distributed housewares and furnishings that he influenced the way many Americans lived and organized their homes in the mid-20th century.

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A Clock With Balls

QUESTION: When I was growing up in the 1950s, my parents had a colorful clock hanging on our living room wall. It had colored balls for the hours and stood out against the white wall. I had forgotten about it until recently when I discovered it, covered with dust, in the attic of my parents’ house as I was cleaning it out after my mother died. What can you tell me about this clock, and does it have any value or should I just give it the old heave ho?

ANSWER: Believe it or not, that dusty old clock is an icon of 1950s modern design. Often listed as being designed by George Nelson, the clock is shrouded in controversy. Yes, George Nelson did indeed play a part in its creation, but historians now believe that its actual designer was Irving Harper, who worked for George Nelson in his design studio.

The Ball Clock was the first of more than 150 clocks designed by George Nelson Associates for the Howard Miller Clock Company, which sold them from 1949 into the 1980s. Nelson Associates, first launched as a studio by George Nelson in 1947 in New York City, employed some of the most celebrated designers of the time, including Irving Harper, Don Chadwick and John Pile, all of whom contributed to the clocks.

George Nelson Associates, Inc., a leading home furnishings and accessories design studio, made modernism the most important driving force during the 1950s.  From his start in the mid-1940s until the mid-1980s,  George Nelson partnered with most of the modern designers of the time. His skill as a writer helped legitimize and stimulate the field of industrial design by contributing to the creation of Industrial Design Magazine in 1953.

Nelson became the Director of Design for Herman Miller, a leading industrial design firm, in 1947 and held the position until 1972. He used the money he earned in this position to open his own design studio in New York City. On October 26, 1955 he incorporated it into George Nelson Associates, Inc. and moved to 251 Park Avenue South. The studio brought together many of the top designers of the time, who were soon designing for Herman Miller under the George Nelson label. Among the noted designers who worked for George Nelson Associates were Irving Harper, George Mulhauser, designer of the Coconut Chair, Robert Brownjohn, designer of the sets for the James Bond film Goldfinger, Don Chadwick, Bill Renwick, Suzanne Sekey, John Svezia, Ernest Farmer, Tobias O'Mara, George Tscherney, who designed the Herman Miller advertisements, Lance Wyman, and John Pile.

But controversy was to cloud George Nelson’s success. In recent years, it has come out that many of the designs for which Nelson accepted credit were actually the work of other designers employed at his studios. Examples of this include the Marshmallow sofa, designed by Irving Harper, and the Action Office, the forerunner of the office cubicle and for which Nelson won the prestigious Alcoa Award, neglecting to mention that it was Robert Propst who actually created it.

It seems that Nelson believed that it was okay for individual designers to be given credit in trade publications, but for the consumer world, the credit should always be to the firm, not the individual.

Nelson’s company designed many wall and table clocks for the Howard Miller Clock Company, including the Ball, Kite, Eye, Turbine, Spindle, Petal and Spike clocks, as well as a handful of desk clocks. However, Irving Harper designed most of them. Howard Miller assigned numbers to all the original clock designs. The most famous, the Ball Clock, became Clock 4755. It was available in six color variations.

According to legend, the Ball Clock was designed by George Nelson, Irving Harper, Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi during a night of drinking in 1947. Its Space Age atomic look supposedly came from the an abstraction of the atom with its nucleus and particles.