Ask historians about the hottest period in product design and they’ll turn the clock back to a time between the 1930s and ’60s-the peak of the “Golden Era of Design,” when all eyes were on Chicago and the sleek, classic household appliances that were taking shape.
“It was a time when America had the inclination to put life in objects,” says Paul Specht, a partner at Goldsmith, Yamasaki, Specht Inc., a Chicago industrial design firm. “America looked at a toaster and it wasn’t just a toaster; it was a chromium jewel.”
Chicago’s location and its abundance of small housewares and furnishings manufacturers is credited with making the city a significant force in the national design arena, according to several design historians.
“Chicago was the hub for communications (for industrial design) in the Midwest,” says John Heskett, who teaches industrial design history at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “There were major mail-order houses and distribution facilities (such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Montgomery Ward & Co. Inc.).”
The toasters and coffeepots designed for these retailers all sported clean lines and little fuss-much like the cars, furniture and fashions popular in America at that time.
“By looking at the early designs, we see products that were sold for their functionality and aesthetic styling,” says Mike Joss, chief designer and president of Joss Design Group, a Chicago-based consulting and industrial design product development firm. “We’ve (since) gone through periods of design where there was a lot of decoration. Now, we are returning to functional, clean lines-the classic styles that appear to mirror the past but are very much today.”
Not surprisingly, many household products from the Golden Era are becoming collectors’ items, notes Victoria Matranga, spokeswoman for the Housewares Manufacturing Association, a national trade group. “These designs are the architecture we live with in miniature,” she says.
Henry Glass, Joseph Palma, Joseph Mango and Charles Harrison were among the leaders of the Chicago-based revolution in industrial design-changing the face of appliances such as toasters, coffeepots, blenders, wafflemakers, frying pans, hairdryers, radios and televisions. Here are their stories.
Henry Glass
Wearing one of his signature monochromatic outfits-gray leather beret, leather tie and sports jacket-architect and designer Henry Glass maneuvers his way down a circular flight of stairs that leads to his small furniture and product showroom in his Northfield home.
“This is much too nice for me to sell in the garage sale,” Glass says as he carries a pair of attached maple chairs with orange leather seats back into his showroom.
“I was going to let this go, but it’s still very good,” says Glass, setting the chairs he designed in the ’50s down and clapping dust from his hands. “It just needs a little cleaning up.”
Glass’ showroom is a capsulized look at his career. There are drawings and models of homes and actual furniture he designed from the ’30s to the present.
“I’ve done housewares and I’m now working on a new line of bathroom accessories,” says Glass, who doesn’t disclose his age. “But I’m most known for furniture.”
In 1939, Glass designed the Hairpin Group, a glass-topped square wrought iron table and four wrought iron chairs with brightly colored canvas seats. The design gets its name from its hairpin-like legs.
“Before, wrought iron design meant curly cues and ornamentation, but the Hairpin Group was the first modern wrought iron furniture,” says Glass, whose design triggered the trend toward bringing wrought iron furnishings out of the garden and into the home.
Like Glass, the Hairpin Group, had its coming out party at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. Glass, who was already a practicing architect and designer in his native Austria, had just come to the United States.
“The success of the Hairpin Group gave my career a push,” says Glass. “It also gave the careers of others a push, too. It became one of the most copied designs (in home furnishings).”
Glass settled in Chicago in 1941 and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for about 20 years. In 1945, he started his design company, Henry P. Glass Associates, which focused on furniture but also created housewares.
The company’s most recognized-and copied-design is Glass’ Cricket chair. It has a triangular leg base and a form-fitting canvas seat.
Designed in 1978, it was first manufactured by California-based furnituremaker Brown Jordan Co., won several national design awards and received Industrial Design magazine’s Design of the Year in 1979.
Though Brown Jordan manufactured Glass’ chair for only three years, the Cricket-or, more accurately, variations of it-are still found in stores today.
Why the popularity?
“It caught people’s attention mainly because the design is very simple,” says Glass. “It folds completely flat, can be transported and stored easily and conforms to your body.”
Charles Harrison
Some Baby Boomers and their parents may remember seeing cartoon characters and vacation photo slides through a View-Master. But the View-Master’s designer, Charles Harrison, 62, still remembers the reaction this hand-held photo slide show got from consumers.
“It was really something. Sometimes I’m still surprised,” says Harrison, who designed the View-Master in 1958 when he worked at Bob Podall Designs in Chicago. The design house, which specializes in photographic and electronic design, has since moved to Arizona.
“It may not be a magnificent design but it was so well accepted by consumers that it has become my most recognizable one.”
Harrison says the View-Master, which he designed just two years into his career, pushed him in the direction he wanted to go in design. “When something like that happens, you certainly have the confidence to keep doing what you’re doing.”
Trained as an industrial designer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he began his career working as a designer at Henry P. Glass Associates in 1956.
“I wanted to get more design experience, but I was hungry more than anything. I needed more money and looked for more work,” says Harrison, who got his foot in the door at Sears as a free-lancer the same year.
Harrison worked for Glass during the day and worked on designs for Sears at night until Sears’ free-lance budget dried up nine months later.
He worked for Podall Designs and Edward Klein designs until Sears hired him as a staff industrial designer in 1961. He later became the company’s first black executive.
He was on Sears’ design team-which included Richard Palese and Allen Karch-for the molded polyethylene garbage can.
“My responsibility was to design the can so it was attractive and workable,” says Harrison, who retired last April from Sears as a senior industrial consultant. “Our can revolutionized the garbage can industry. Before, cans were made of galvanized steel and they rusted out. Our design withstood any punishment.”
Harrison, lives in Evanston with his wife, Janet, and teaches industrial design part-time at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also is the design director for Over the Rainbow Corp., an area housing developer for the disabled.
Joseph Mango
“Industrial design may mean designing for industry but that’s not a clear description of all that we do,” says Joseph Mango, co-owner of the 48-year-old Banka Mango Inc., one of Chicago’s oldest industrial design firms. “As a designer you’re always going against the tide and hoping what you’re doing is good.”
A mechanical engineer by training, Mango and his wife, Peg, live in the 4,000-square-foot, three-level, California-style home he designed and built in Midlothian.
The cabinets and small appliances (coffeepot and toaster) in the kitchen, with the exception of a microwave oven, are products designed and made by Mango 33 years ago.
Like most designers of his day, Mango, 70, says he wonders if he was contributing to society during his heyday. He says he realized he was on to something 40 years ago while lecturing about his concept for a square washing machine.
His design was made by now-defunct Thor Corp. in 1952, replacing ringer washers that had legs instead of wheels.
“It fit into a kitchen or utility room,” he says of his machine. “It was functional and added to the aesthetics of the home.
“This gave us a position in the housewares and kitchen appliance industry, and more visibility,” says Mango, who went on to win a medal in 1962 from President John F. Kennedy for designing the U.S. pavilion at the International Trade Fair in Pakistan.
Banka Mango has at least 200 patents, ranging from the first vaculator coffeepot (a cousin to the percolator) to the first U.S.-made snowmobile.
Mango’s vaculator and Early American coffeepot, named for its America eagle design motif, are used in his home. Both have a chromium-mirror shine that defies anyone to guess their 40-plus ages.
Joseph Palma
With his soft-spoken speech and gentle mannerisms, Joseph Palma weighs in with modesty.
Palma, an architect, says his industrial design career took off when he was hired by Montgomery Ward in 1935 and became head of the design department months later.
“When Miss (Ann) Swainson (head of Ward’s corporate design department) appointed me to that (head design) position, I finally had the confidence I needed to ask my wife (Mildred) to marry me,” says Palma, 84, who is now retired and lives with Mildred in a Carol Stream retirement facility.
He struck out on his own in 1936, formed two industrial design firms and taught industrial design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for about 20 years.
“I’m most proud of the pianos and organs I designed,” says Palma. “I never played the piano or organ, but I was always attracted to the piano. There was something about styling them that I enjoyed.
“Of the cabinets I designed, I can’t say that I have a favorite, but my style leaned more toward clean, loose lines,” says Palma, who designed for Story and Clark, Hammond, Yamaha and Steinway.
Palma, who no longer owns any of his pianos and only few of his original appliance designs, does have the first bathroom scale he designed for the Brearley Scale Co. in 1955, then located in Rockford.
Cased in vinyl, Palma’s rectangular floor scale had a slick, smooth surface.
“Before 1955, the scales were all metal, boxy and unattractive,” says Palma, who also designed the O Cedar Co. mops and cleaning tools. “Some may say this (scale) is not a good design because it looks like you’re going to slip off when you stand on it, but you don’t.”
And Palma’s 38-year-old scale still works.
“The only difference,” he says, “is that I’ve put on a few pounds since I designed it.”
