In the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes in Paris, political fractures become visible through design: Werkbund, Bauhaus and De Stijl –the "idealist functionalists"- are excluded. LeCorbusier´s functionalist, purist “Esprit Nouveau” pavillon, and the pavilion of Russia, are in a stark contrast to the rest shown. L’ Esprit Nouveau was a magazine edited by Le Corbusier and Amédéé Ozenfant. They postulated that the machine age needs a new architecture – the house as a machine.
The Russians used modernism as a political message – in tune with the Bauhaus paradigm, they believed that the objects of everyday life influence behavior; For them, the bareness of functionalism was a welcome symbol against the “decadent” luxury of the bourgeoisie. Less than ten years later, Stalin would dispose of functionalist aesthetics, and force all Russian artists to be “socialist realists”.
Le Corbusier´s pavillon was originally designed as an architectural module to be stacked up to form a skyscraper. Le Corbusier´s pavillon is so politically incorrect, so shocking for the prevailing taste, that the organisers go great lengths to hide it: They give Le Corbusier the last, hidden corner of the fairground and erect an 18 feet high fence to keep it out of view. Only with the intervention of a government minister, the fence is torn down. The pavillon is awarded the first prize by an international jury, but the French member of the Jury states that the pavillon is not architecture and succeeds with his veto.
The other pavilions in the The Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes come in a style which should get its name by the exhibition: Art Deco. It is a style which over time incorporates everything which was en vogue at its time with superficial abstraction and a sense for pathos: Orientalism, Egyptian Art, Aztec and Mayan elements, Russian Constructivism, the fascination of technology and the worship of speed as shown by the Italian futurists. The origin of Art Deco is in the Vienna of the turn of the century. Joseph Hoffman and the Wiener Werkstätte give burgeoisie a new appearance, away from the ” faux” attitude of ubiquitous neo-classicism.
Art Deco, the fascination with superficial abstraction, comes to the US after the 1925 Exposition in Paris together with people like French Art Deco poster painter Raymond Loewy, who will later become a pre-eminent figure of American Industrial Design; Eliel Saarinnen, who leaves Finland in 1923 and later becomes the first director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan; and Kem Weber from Berlin, who opens a design studio in LA in 1927. While Art deco remains a luxury style in Europe, it becomes ubiquitous in the US as soon as it meets mass-production. Art Deco glorifies the “modern times”; It decorates, symbolizes and reaffirms contemporary worldviews, leaving nothing untouched. Art Deco makes churches of corporate office buildings and temples out of department stores, and it marks the beginning for industrial design.
An early example for the application of Art Deco to mass-produced consumer products are the Art Deco patterned cameras which Walter Dorwin Teague designs from 1928 through 1933 for Kodak. The split of image and content becomes visible: Teague separates the appearance and the content – the appearance is designed to appeal to a market segment, its premium goal is to seduce the customer. The modernists, in the meanwhile, strive for an essence expressed in appearance: In their view, the appearance has to embody truth by reflecting the content. The cover is directly linked to the essence of the object and machine.
This modernist preoccupation with the internal relation of the signifier (the appearance) and the signified (the content) produces purist, bare designs which probably appeal to the intellectuals of the time, but that’s where its acceptance stops. In contrast, the emerging industrial design discipline is interested in the external relation of the signifier to the perceiver, the customer. Teague’s cameras are conceived to appeal to women. Coming in pink and together with lipstick and mirror in a make-up box, they reinforce social stereotypes in colour and set-up.
The signifier (the design) is detaching itself from its content, its makes the content look better, it covers the content. “Ugliness doesn´t sell”, Loewy says. The prettification is done for the goal of selling, thus it has to reflect - and at the same time subtly manipulate- the ideas of beauty already existing in a society at a given time. Functionalists and Modernists shocked the public of the early 20th century because of its preoccupation with the internal semantic relation of signifier to signified. By ignoring the external relation to the receptors it produced designs which did not correlate to anything seen before. The functionalists did not negotiate ideas of beauty with society. They believed that there is an unchangeble “truth” in the correlation of signified to signifier.
The industrial designers, in the meanwhile, continued the tradition of applied arts in negotiating appearance to clients, using the appearance as a sales tool rather than as a reflection of its content. The functionalist approach, by its very idea, refused the idea of esthetically negotiating the artifact with the recipient in a market. This is because the logic of functionalism demands that the user has to adapt to the functionalist artifact – it constructs a truth claim chain from signified (the essence, the content) to the signifier (the appearance, the design) and assumes that the recipient, if he is true himself, must naturally accept, understand and embrace the functionalist esthetic. However, by refusing communication, it did not avoid manipulation. The industrial design approach, on the other hand, was focused on the negotiation with society, willing to manipulate and to convince by design. Loewy´s motto: "MAYA – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable".
Functionalism was concerned with the relationship of production and appearance, it assumes that an appearance which is “true” to its “becoming part of the world” is signified truth. It takes the signifier as inextricably liked to the signified.
Industrial design was concerned with the relationship of appearance and consumer: it was negotiating esthetics, manipulating desire, and detaching the signifier of the signified.
Art Deco, the abstraction of the image without going too far, was the first successful design style, applied to everything from magazine covers to skyscrapers and tableware. Art Deco was superficiality par excellence, the style for the nouveau riches, being far enough removed from the classicist taste ideals of the old bourgeoisie while yet confirming its basic beliefs. Art deco glorified power and money without alienating its consumers with the bare, naked esthetics of the machine; It was propaganda applied to surfaces.
