Futurist and father of streamlining Norman Bel Geddes feted in new exhibit

Norman Bel Geddes's teardrop car model. Photo by A. Van Dyke.

Norman Bel Geddes didn't design a single vehicle that entered production. He didn't hold down any job with an automaker for more than a few years, and in fact, he much preferred designing theater sets over designing anything else, cars included. Yet he proved immeasurably influential to automotive and transportation design, warranting a new exhibit that traces his career and legacy.

Photo courtesy Florida Memory.

Much like a couple of his contemporaries, Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Bel Geddes envisioned not just snippets of potential futures, but an overarching and unified future where architecture and planned communities integrated with industrial design and transportation. He began to express those ideas in 1927 when, after finding success at stage design and after finding the boxy cars and trucks of the day disappointing, he designed a number of futuristic vehicles, some of the earliest ones to apply engineers' ideas on streamlining to car bodies here in the States, leading many to label Bel Geddes as the father of the term "streamlining."

(We should note here that others - most notably Paul Jaray, Edmund Rumpler, and Dennis Burney - had explored streamlining as it applies to automobiles before Bel Geddes, but it was Bel Geddes's long and flowing lines that brought an aesthetic sense to the field and that set the mold for futuristic car designs for the next few decades.)

As Michael Lamm wrote in Special Interest Autos #40, May-July 1977, those automotive designs caught the attention of Graham-Paige's Ray Graham, who hired Bel Geddes the following year as a styling consultant and tasked him with designing the Graham-Paige of 1933 and working backwards from that design year by year to allow the company to incrementally work toward Bel Geddes's radical designs. The onset of the Depression the following year would derail those grand plans, but Bel Geddes stayed on with Graham-Paige until Ray Graham's death in 1932.

Bel Geddes followed that stint with his 1932 book Horizons, in which he articulated his ideas on automobile design, arguing that engines should drive the car from the rear, that drivers should sit up front and center for a commanding view of the road, and that automobiles should ride on six or eight wheels instead of four, echoing Milton O. Reeves's assertions of a couple of decades prior. Along with the book, he built another set of models, which this time caught the attention of Walter P. Chrysler, who in 1933 invited Bel Geddes to submit some proposals for a compact car and some improvements and spin-offs of the Chrysler Airflow.

He followed that contract with work for Autocar (focused on making the company's trucks look more powerful) and Texaco (designing the Doodlebug Diamond T fuel oil delivery trucks) before approaching Shell in 1937 with a plan to develop his vision for a city of the future, which used superhighways to keep traffic moving through and above cities. While Shell funded Bel Geddes's model for an advertising campaign, he nevertheless approached General Motors with it, convincing Alfred Sloan to let him develop it for GM's pavilion at the upcoming 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.

Photos via GM, Library of Congress, Rich701, Harry Ransom Center.

Though it ended up costing GM $7 million - or as much as $237 million in today's dollars - the resulting Futurama exhibit proved a hit for GM, with lines snaking around the building waiting for a chance to see Bel Geddes's elaborately executed vision for the cities and highways of 1960. The layout encompassed an entire acre and included half a million individual buildings, a million individual trees of 13 species, 50,000 cars (all, naturally, rear-engined streamliners with a multitude of wheels), and a 14-lane interstate highway that separated traffic out according to speed and destination while at the same time accommodating urban pedestrian traffic. As Adnan Morshed of the National Air and Space Museum wrote in The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama:

the Futurama aspired to be the culmination of early-twentieth-century urbanist thinking. (It) prophesied an American utopia regulated by an assortment of cutting-edge technologies: remote-controlled multilane highways, power plants, farms for artificially produced crops, rooftop platforms for individual flying machines and autogyros, and various gadgets, all of which were intended to create an idea built environment and, ultimately, to reform society.

Visitors sat on a conveyor belt and looked down on the spectacle from above, taking an 18-minute narrated tour as if they flew above the landscape. The end of the tour then dropped them off at a full-scale street intersection as envisioned by Bel Geddes, complete with passenger flyovers and GM cars and trucks comprising the "traffic" below. Tens of thousands of visitors took in Bel Geddes's Futurama every day - estimates range from about 10 million to 25 million overall - making it the fair's most visited attraction.

"Futurama's giant model of America in 1960, complete with glass-clad skyscrapers and multilevel superhighways, gave Depression-era Americans genuine hope for a better future within their lifetimes," Donald Albrecht wrote in Norman Bel Geddes Designs America. "It was Geddes, more than any designer of his era, who created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future with an image that was streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic. Today, as seen in the 'retro-futurist' looks of theme parks, animated television programs, and popular novels, Geddes's vision of the future continues to shape and inspire the twenty-first-century American imagination."

One would have thought that Bel Geddes would have parlayed such a success into a career in automotive or transportation design, but apart from a two-year contract for Nash, a 1940 design for a streamlined tank, and an assignment to design delivery and sales trucks for IBM, Bel Geddes remained largely involved in theater set design until his death in 1958.

Today, Bel Geddes's archives reside at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which in the fall of 2012 assembled about 200 of Bel Geddes's drawings, models, photographs, and films for I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, an exhibit that, according to the Harry Ransom Center's blog, "highlights Bel Geddes's creativity and desire to transform American society through design." The exhibit then traveled to the Museum of the City of New York from last October through this February and has now gone to the Wolfsonian at Florida International University in Miami Beach.

"Geddes was both a visionary and a pragmatist who had a significant role in shaping not only modern America, but also the nation's image of itself as leading the way into the future," Albrecht wrote. "Underlying Geddes's amazing array of efforts were themes that can be traced throughout his career: his commitments to the power of unfettered imagination and the primacy of the individual, his fascination with nature as a model for imitation, and his belief in the possibility of a utopian future. And Geddes's showmanship became his trademark."

I Have Seen the Future will run through September 28 at the Wolfsonian. For more information, visit Wolfsonian.org.