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“Burgess Battery Company” Communication Booth, circa 1941.
Burgess Battery “Accousti-booth” design, circa 1940.
“Osterizer” brochure page, circa 1950.
Magazine advertisement, circa 1931.
Oster mixer ad, May 1949.
Number 40 “Rod Type Drink Mixer” for Oster, circa 1940s.
Design for “Lucite” floor radio for Stewart Warner, circa 1934.
Design for refrigerator for Stewart Warner, 1935.
Oster mixer patents, 1951.
Presentation rendering for Mueller Plumbing, circa 1928.
Knife Sharpener for Oster, circa 1950s.
Earliest “Osterizer,” circa 1950s.
Presentation rendering for Sunbeam, 1947.
Trophy for Outdoor Advertising Art, 1938.
Design for “Coronet” for Wahl-Eversharp, circa 1936.
Designs for Republic Flow Meters. circa 1934.
Design for “Freezone” unit, circa 1953.
“Massagett” for Oster, circa 1950s. |
The years 1933 and 1934 were a watershed for design in America. The influence of Hollywood, the need to escape the Great Depression, and the impact of Chicago’s World’s Fair propelled the cult of the “new” in marketing. The famed Chrysler Pavilion, designed by Holabird and Root, had been publicized in the first year of the fair showing cars not far removed stylistically from Model As. By the second summer, the modernist building showcased automobiles that resembled rocket ships. At the same time, makers of small appliances began flooding the market with aerodynamic toasters, refrigerators, and ranges. Manufacturers, desperate to update their wares, hired Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and even Hollywood designers to add panache to products that hadn’t been changed since they were introduced. Newness in the 1920s could have been expressed by Georgian-styled electric percolators or lightning-bolt decals glued onto old-fashioned carpet sweepers. The 1930s, however, became a do-or-die period for American business, and smart marketing of these products could mean the difference in the leanest of all times. Industrial design was certainly not a new endeavor for Iannelli. His early advertising illustrations and packaging designs used nearly the same approach. The furniture he designed for the Byrne projects and, of course, the floor lamps and table accessories he showed at his 1921 Art Institute exhibit were close cousins to the appliances that occupied the Iannelli Studios thoughout the 1930s. “Art is the sense of fitness” pertained as often to refrigerators and radios as it did to the sculptures he designed for Wright or Byrne.
MODERNITY One of Iannelli’s lectures in the late 1920s dealt with the effect modern design had on the home: “Our radio cabinets that were made to look like Victrolas are gradually becoming more charming and neat and will soon be honestly designed so that we will enjoy the looks as much as the music.” Iannelli was ideally positioned to take on a raft of new clients in the months after the fair’s first summer. His earlier alliance with Associated Arts & Industries had also introduced him to business tycoons and manufacturers of consumer products. As he had done throughout his career, Iannelli tried to capitalize on the contacts made with manufacturers and exhibitors at the World’s Fair. But it may have been Iannelli’s small job in the 1920s, redesigning the office logo for New York’s leading advertising agency, Erwin, Wasey & Company, that led to acquaintances with other ad firms then exercising a greater voice in the design work of their manufacturing clients. Since 1928, he’d been designing display fixtures and bathroom lavatories on a yearly retainer for the Mueller Plumbing Company on the advice of their advertising agency.
EVERSHARP Wahl Eversharp, as did Parker Pens for a time, had employed Iannelli Studios since 1926 on retainer for $1,000 yearly. After designing their exhibit at the fair, the Studios were again contracted by Wahl in 1935 for $2,000 to design some of its vast line of fountain pens, desk sets, mechanical pencils, and packaging. One of his pen and pencil sets, the Coronet, according to a contemporary historian of Wahl products, “is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful pens ever produced.” An essay/lecture Iannelli wrote at the time, “The Promise of Industrial Design in America,” outlines his thoughts on the subject: Industrial design is somewhat of a fad right now and the sales motif is unnecessarily exaggerated and out of proportion to a sensible development, and most salesmen have too much to say about the looks of the article that they sell, so they are apt to pick on a fad. Stream-line is one of them, although streamlining is a very sensible principle to use in any mobile commodity that needs to move fast in space, such as a motorcar, an airplane, or a steamship, this streamlining has very little to do with a desk set, a piece of furniture, an electric iron, a washing machine or a house. So much of industrial design is done under this false premise and therefore harmful. The artists are used as servants in an ignoble cause.
A TRADE GROUP By 1927, industrial design was finally becoming its own profession. In 1928, Iannelli and other like-minded designers thought it was time to establish a Chicago chapter of New York’s American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (A.U.D.A.C.). After many meetings, the Chicago group decided to have an independent organization composed of its best architects and designers they called the League of American Designers. Iannelli was elected president, but members’ lack of enthusiasm caused the alliance to soon fall apart. Later, the American Institute of Decorators invited industrial designers to form the Designers’ Institute of the American Furniture Mart. That too led to a need for their own group devoted to mass production, which finally coalesced in 1938 with the Chicago chapter of the Society of Industrial Designers. Iannelli’s group eventually transformed into the American Designers Institute, Society of Industrial Designers, the American Society of Industrial Design, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), and finally the International Housewares Association, surviving to this day as the most important trade organization in the field.
RADIOS Fairbanks, Morse & Company had a showroom in the General Exhibits building of the Fair. The Studios had also remodeled their Wabash Avenue headquarters. Iannelli signed a working agreement with them on June 13, 1934, for $2,000 a year. The contract began with this paragraph: “With a view to improving the appearance and mechanical artistry of the various products of Fairbanks, Morse & Co., it has been decided to retain as a design consultant, Mr. Alfonso Iannelli to contribute his skill and genius to the improvement.” Fairbanks had acquired the Audiola Company of Chicago and planned to introduce two new lines of radios, floor consoles, and tabletop models called “midgets.” Iannelli and his best designers, Charles Pope and Bruce Goff, submitted designs to the company. Mortimer Frankel, the former president of Audiola and now the general manager of Fairbanks’ home appliances division, wrote back: “A review of the console sketches submitted indicates that you do not have one number that is inexpensive. With respect to the midget cabinets, while they are to receive the same general treatment with respect to airflow or streamline effect, there is a trend towards making midget cabinets massive looking.”
In March of 1972, Bruce Goff answered a letter sent to him from Sharon Rubin, then writing her dissertation about Iannelli. Goff had come to Chicago and the Iannelli Studios from Tulsa in 1934. In addition to the radio cabinets, he helped design trophies for the Outdoor Advertising Association. He reminisced to Rubin: “When I first went to Park Ridge to work with Iannelli, he was doing quite a lot of industrial design work, which was considered by many “artists” as ‘sacrilegious’ at that time. I do remember working on some radio designs for Stewart Warner then. I wanted to make the “cabinets” of transparent Lucite so you could see the “works” inside, which we thought were beautiful but the clients would not go along with it. Also we attempted to reduce the size of the big ‘table models’ which looked too much like tombstones, but the clients demanded ‘giant midgets!’” WASHERS Any way a company could identify its product as “new,” even if it was the same thing repackaged, was how America stayed in business. Fairbanks, Morse suggested that they might introduce a line of clothes washers, cobbled together from off-the-shelf components but with new appearances. Iannelli first wrote to the Lovell Manufacturing Company of Erie, Pennsylvania, makers of clothes wringers, rubber rolls, mouse and rat traps and, oddly, hockey sticks, to inquire about their wholesale prices for their own parts. In short order, he had developed a network of suppliers across the country to provide him the basic components for these redesigns. Over the next two years, Iannelli studios had designed for Fairbanks a diesel engine, washing machines, radios, the first home stoker, dials, a refrigerator, showroom displays, elevator doors, and a new humidifier called an “Orthoclime.”
RETAINERS Birtman Electric, another of his former fair clients, signed with the Studios for $1,000 and continued to pay him a retainer until 1938, commissioning Iannelli to design its irons and vacuum cleaners. He had designed an electric iron for them that Sears Roebuck had sold in 1932. And in 1935, Iannelli signed a contract with Stewart-Warner for another one-year retainer at $1,000. He was fortunate to have these contracts in the years immediately following the World’s Fair because his income was dropping precipitously. Since 1933, when his tax records list he had taken in $32,000, and 1934, which showed revenues of $16,000, his billings in 1935 had plunged to less than $9,000. During the fair, he employed up to fifteen artisans. Two years later, he couldn’t even afford to keep Bruce Goff. Only Ruth Blackwell would remain a permanent member of the Studios. He was always the cheerful salesman, though, in spite of his dire financial straits. In a 1935 letter to a possible client, Gordon Abbott, he wrote: “We of course are carrying on a good deal of industrial designing, making diesel engines look swifter, and radio cabinets look larger, and refrigerators look warmer.”
COFFEEMASTER Though they had worked together off and on since 1935, in April of 1938, the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company, makers of animal clippers, industrial furnaces, lawn sprinklers, and Sunbeam electric appliances, signed Iannelli Studios to a one-year, $2,500 contract. That agreement starts: “With a view to improving the appearance and mechanical artistry of the various products of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company, it has been decided to retain as a design consultant, Mr. Alfonso Iannelli to contribute his skill and genius to the improvement.” Though it’s possible that Iannelli just repeated the same “skill and genius” wording that the Fairbanks contract initiated, the earlier one more than likely originated with him, as well. The American proclivity to categorization, an offshoot of standardization, which had been key to its world dominance in manufacturing, impeded the business world from thinking outside of conventional wisdom. Iannelli probably needed to reinforce his expertise to executives used to thinking of designers as mere decorators. Iannelli recalled in a brief history of his best-known appliance design: “We were called by the Sunbeam Corporation [at that time, it was still called the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company] in early January of 1938 to design a coffeemaker. We found that the Sunbeam Corporation had made, in their own departments, a few models which were on the way to resolving the design. One of the drawings was dated December 27, 1937.”
After the Studio elaborated on the mechanics designed by Sunbeam’s own departments, it was decided by the Flexible Shaft Company in mid-February to accept Iannelli’s eighth concept. This resulted in the Coffeemaster Model C20 (later C30), which was produced by the company through the 1950s. Selling for $16 alone and $23.50 for a set that included a tray and matching sugar and cream vessels, the Coffeemaster was such a successful product that the entire company renamed itself “Sunbeam” in 1946. Iannelli designed several toasters for Sunbeam, as well. But other than the incised ornament borrowed from the Coffeemaster, his designs for those were not used. FINDING CLIENTS In what now is referred to as “cold calling,” he wrote companies unsolicited letters suggesting improvements to their products, often accompanied with sketches. Sometimes it would lead to further dialogue, and other times the company would take offense. In a letter dated June 24, 1938, Iannelli wrote to the director of Los Angeles’ Art Center School, Edward A. Adams. After some pleasantries regarding an exhibit there he could not attend, Iannelli’s third paragraph suggests that nothing was beyond his attempts to secure commissions: “You have been so kind to offer help, would you investigate something for me? You know the trophy which is given as the Academy Award to the moving picture stars is “pretty bad.” Could the proper people be seen and suggestions made to them of having a creative piece of sculpture which adequately and beautifully symbolizes the “gift of drama,” and a work of art? OSTER In the summer of 1944, the John Oster Manufacturing Company did the cold calling to him, suggesting an alliance between the Racine company and Iannelli Studios. New York’s Museum of Modern Art had included Iannelli’s Bakelite handled iron in the industrial design exhibition, Useful Objects, at the time that may have compelled Oster’s call. The Studios started small with the restyling of a set of hand-operated hair clippers but by early 1948 Oster and Iannelli entered into a design relationship that would provide consultation and create models, perspective renderings, and working drawings for various products for a fee of $4,000. By 1950, they had signed an agreement for the design of a hair dryer, knife sharpener, Osterizer, sterilizer, and lather maker for a base payment of $2,400 over one year. With extra design payments, Oster paid the Studios about $5,000 that year and the same in 1951. During the course of their relationship, the Studios had also designed a jet dryer, hand grinder, two electric hair clippers, a “cheap” Osterizer and hair dryer, a “better” Osterizer, orange juicer, food mixer, and cocktail mixer.
INVISIBLE KITCHEN Although working on retainer to large companies helped enormously in providing a somewhat regular income to the Studios, Iannelli had to contractually agree that all patents that might be filed belonged to the respective company and not to him, so “assigned to [the particular company]” became routine language on all but one of his patent applications. In late 1947, H.H. (Mike) Bryan contracted with Iannelli to design a combination stove, sink, and refrigerator unit that would be called the “Invisible Kitchen.” The fee would be $4,000, and the patent would be held by Iannelli himself. Hotels and apartment buildings had long provided small scale kitchens. One designed in 1937 was even called “The Invisible Kitchen.” Bryan and his partners wanted to market a unit that looked like the large phonograph cabinets seen in living rooms all over the country. He envisioned fine cabinetry enclosing utilitarian components and probably thought Iannelli could design it because of his experience with manufacturers of kitchen devices and his earlier work designing wood furniture.
Iannelli researched the off-the-shelf components that could be used and even noted in a memo that a wooden cabinet could be built that would be more affordable. However, the drawings the Studio produced couldn’t be used to build a properly working model by the Indiana firm hired to build the prototype. And after two years of work, the model was thrown out by Bryan. He had heard from the Muncie firm, the Underwriters Lab, and other independent engineers and manufacturers that the unit couldn’t be built from Iannelli’s designs. Furious, Bryan wrote to Iannelli in late 1949 after the designer’s request for the final payment, “I realize that your kind of thinking is not like that of a manufacturer or banker, but they have to perform or get nothing.” Perhaps stung that others were disparaging his work, Iannelli continued working on the project, and in 1953, a patent was issued to him for the Invisible Kitchen. But it wasn’t designed to look like a piece of living room cabinetry. Instead, it was composed of institutional steel cabinetry that folded into a closed form. THE 1950s The Illinois Institute of Technology and Industrial Design Magazine sponsored one of the first exhibits of industrial design in 1954. The Sunbeam Coffeemaster and a number of the Oster products on show were the first acknowledgment of Iannelli’s name in the IIT record, although a check with their library archives has turned up no mention of the exhibition at the school itself. Though Iannelli and Mike Bryan repaired their friendship, even entering into another project to design a small freezer called the “Freezone,” nothing was built for production. By 1959, Bryan wrote Iannelli: “As to the kitchen deal, seems to me the dodo is dead, and what I have to work on, or with, is nil.…Naturally I hated to lose the several thousand dollars and all the time put into that thing, but it sure died a lonesome death. Never could find a mfgr wanting to try it, except the firm in Kewaunee, and they went busted. So, tell me where to go, what to do, and how to go at this.” “Dear Mike,” wrote Iannelli in January of that year, “I just saw in the Industrial Design magazine the kitchen cabinet that is very much like the one we designed for you on the Invisible Kitchen. The people who are getting it out are the Dwyer Products Corporation, Michigan City, Indiana. They have practically the same arrangement that we have. They call it the Snack Bar.” |
