Christina Cogdell

This examination of the impact of the Eugenics movement on the designers that created the "Streamline" moment in 1930s America is heavier on the eugenics than it is on the design, but it does provide a useful reminder of how pervasive eugenic thinking was at the time. Partly because both eugenics and industrial design were responses to the social stresses of the rise of mass industrial society. Partly because a fantasy of totalizing control might be expected during a dislocation of elite expectations as brutal as the Great Depression. Cogdell is also rather good at illustrating how the programs of the great industrial designers of the period and the eugenics enthusiasts were riddled with unexamined assumptions that rendered them more expressions of their culture rather than the molders of culture they imagined themselves to be.

Further, this is one of those times when the woman's touch is particularly to be appreciated, as Cogdell is very alert to the objectification of women implicit in all these programs; not that these drives were deeply hidden.

If you want to have a particular issue with Cogdell it's that much of her evidence of the interaction between the designers who created the Streamline style and the enthusiasts of the eugenics movement is rather circumstantial; probably more so than she hoped, seeing as Cogdell did make use of the personal archives of Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and the like. You actually get rather more about how the new decorative culture impacted on the marketing of eugenics to the American general public.

Also, if the main result of the designers and the eugenicists was to call for the creation of a population and physical environment friendly to the mass-marketing machine of American big business, there probably should have been more of an examination of the response of the CEO class to these social movements. Perhaps that is another book though.… (plus d'informations)