‘Transforming the Audience: Theatricality in the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, 1914-1939’ in Design and Popular Entertainment (Manchester: MUP, 2009), edited by Christopher Frayling and Emily King, 36-56.

Maffei, Nicolas ‘Transforming the Audience: Theatricality in the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, 1914-1939’ in Design and Popular Entertainment (Manchester: MUP, 2009), edited by Christopher Frayling and Emily King, 36-56. In: UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract

Research on Geddes has mostly investigated his work as it contributes to the American style of streamlining (Bush, 1975; Lichtenstein and Engler, 1995; Hanks, 2005) whereas Maffei’s chapter engages with intellectual and cultural-historical methodologies in order to relate Geddes’ design philosophy to broader intellectual contexts, e.g. modernist architectural theory, industrial philosophy, and futurology. The chapter reveals how Geddes bridged the avant-garde and mass culture, and contributes more broadly to discourses considering the spiritual and intellectual basis for two significant strains of American design: the New Stagecraft (Wainscott 1997) and consultant design (Meikle 1978). The chapter evolved out of Maffei’s contribution to conferences and symposia including ‘Contradictory Modernism: Theosophy and the Designs of Norman Bel Geddes’ at the Enchanting Modernity: Theosophy and the Arts in the Making of Early Twentieth Century Culture symposium, Liverpool Hope University (12.2010); and ‘Practical Visionary: Norman Bel Geddes and the design rhetoric of 1930s America’ at the American ImageText conference, University of East Anglia (06.2011). Critical dialogues initiated by Maffei at Enchanting Modernity will be revisited in an international context in the Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the Arts in the Modern World symposium convened by the University of Amsterdam (09.2013). The chapter is based on archival research undertaken at the Norman Bel Geddes Archive, Harry Ransom Centre (HRC), Texas funded by a Dorot Fellowship. Research for the chapter centred on Geddes’s designs and his personal library, a heavily annotated collection of works on modernist design, psychoanalysis, scientific management, Bolshevism, Theosophy and machine-age proselytizing. The methodology used primary sources and documentary evidence to establish and exemplify chains of influence definitively, rather than through inference. It combined a biographical approach with a bibliographic one, examining Geddes’s book ownership and use, while undertaking close reading of his marginalia for evidence of his intellectual biography.

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