Both Natural and Mechanical: The Streamlined Designs of Norman Bel Geddes

Between the 1930s, when it first gained force as a styling fad, and the 1950s, when it had achieved widespread and long-standing popularity, streamlining developed seemingly irreconcilable cultural connotations. Depending on the circumstances, it could be understood as mechanical, natural, avant-garde or popular. This article examines the work of the pioneer American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, an early and significant exponent of streamlining, to argue that the style has been largely overlooked as an important modernist expression, containing within it a number of competing and contradictory meanings. While designers such as Geddes considered the aerodynamic aesthetic both functional and expressive, critics of streamlining considered it a threat to a more narrowly defined form of modernism. (Author abstract)