Norman Bel Geddes by Frances Resor Waite c

Norman Bel Geddes (born Norman Melancton Geddes; April 27, 1893 – May 8, 1958) was an American theatrical and industrial designer.

Early life

Bel Geddes was born Norman Melancton Geddes in

Adrian, Michigan Adrian is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Lenawee County. The population was 20,645 at the 2020 census. Adrian lies in Michigan's 7th congressional district. History Adrian was founded on June 18, 1826 by Addison ...

and was raised in

New Philadelphia, Ohio New Philadelphia is a city in and the county seat of Tuscarawas County, Ohio, United States. The county's largest city, New Philadelphia lies along the Tuscarawas River. The population was 17,677 at the 2020 census. It is a principal city in th ...

, the son of Flora Luelle (née Yingling) and Clifton Terry Geddes, a stockbroker. When he married Helen Belle Schneider in 1916, they combined their names to ''Bel Geddes''. Their daughters were actress

Barbara Bel Geddes Barbara Bel Geddes (October 31, 1922 – August 8, 2005) was an American stage and screen actress, artist, and children's author whose career spanned almost five decades. She was best known for her starring role as Miss Ellie Ewing in the t ...

and writer Joan Ulanov.

Career

Bel Geddes began his career with set designs for

Aline Barnsdall Louise Aline Barnsdall (April 1, 1882 – December 18, 1946) was an American oil heiress, best known as Frank Lloyd Wright's client for the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, now the centerpiece of the city's Barnsdall Art Park. Biography Born i ...

's Los Angeles Little Theater in the 1916–17 season, then in 1918 as the scene designer for the

Metropolitan Opera The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is operat ...

in New York. He designed and directed various theatrical works, from ''Arabesque'' and ''

The Five O'Clock Girl ''The Five O'Clock Girl'' is a musical with a book by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, music by Harry Ruby, and lyrics by Bert Kalmar. It focuses on wealthy Beekman Place playboy Gerald Brooks and impoverished shopgirl Patricia Brown, who become ...

'' on Broadway to an ice show, ''It Happened on Ice'', produced by

Sonja Henie Sonja Henie (8 April 1912 – 12 October 1969) was a Norwegian figure skater and film star. She was a three-time Olympic champion (1928, 1932, 1936) in women's singles, a ten-time World champion (1927–1936) and a six-time European champion ...

. He also created set designs for the film ''

Feet of Clay Feet of clay is an idiom used to refer to a weakness or character flaw, especially in people of prominence and power. It can also be used to refer to larger groups, such as societies, businesses, and empires. An entity with feet of clay may app ...

'' (1924), directed by

Cecil B. DeMille Cecil Blount DeMille (; August 12, 1881January 21, 1959) was an American film director, producer and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of the American cin ...

, designed costumes for

Max Reinhardt Max Reinhardt (; born Maximilian Goldmann; 9 September 1873 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his innovative stage productions, he is regarded as one of the most promi ...

, and created the sets for the Broadway production of

Sidney Kingsley Sidney Kingsley (22 October 1906 – 20 March 1995) was an American dramatist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play '' Men in White'' in 1934. Life and career Kingsley was born Sidney Kirschner in New York. He studied at ...

's '' Dead End'' (1935). Bel Geddes opened an industrial-design studio in 1927, and designed a wide range of commercial products, from cocktail shakers to commemorative medallions to radio cabinets. His designs extended to unrealized futuristic concepts: a teardrop-shaped automobile, and an

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

House of Tomorrow. In 1929, he designed "

Airliner Number 4 Airliner Number 4 was a design by Norman Bel Geddes and Otto A. Koller for a 9-deck amphibious passenger aircraft intended to replace the large transatlantic liners that traveled between Europe and North America before the Second World War. It was ...

," a 9-deck amphibian

airliner An airliner is a type of aircraft for transporting passengers and air cargo. Such aircraft are most often operated by airlines. Although the definition of an airliner can vary from country to country, an airliner is typically defined as an ...

that incorporated areas for deck-games, an

orchestra An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...

, a

gym A gymnasium, also known as a gym, is an indoor location for athletics. The word is derived from the ancient Greek term " gymnasium". They are commonly found in athletic and fitness centres, and as activity and learning spaces in educational ...

nasium, a

solarium Solarium may refer to: * A sunroom, a room built largely of glass to afford exposure to the sun * A terrace (building) or flat housetop * The '' Solarium Augusti'', a monumental meridian line (or perhaps a sundial) erected in Rome by Emperor Augus ...

, and two airplane

hangar A hangar is a building or structure designed to hold aircraft or spacecraft. Hangars are built of metal, wood, or concrete. The word ''hangar'' comes from Middle French ''hanghart'' ("enclosure near a house"), of Germanic origin, from Frankish ...

s. His book ''Horizons'' (1932) had a significant impact: "By popularizing streamlining when only a few engineers were considering its functional use, he made possible the design style of the thirties." He wrote forward-looking articles for popular American periodicals. In the classic science fiction film of

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

Things to Come'' (1936), he assisted production designer

William Cameron Menzies William Cameron Menzies (July 29, 1896 – March 5, 1957) was an American film production designer (a job title he invented) and art director as well as a film director and producer during a career spanning five decades. He began his caree ...

on the look of the world of tomorrow. Bel Geddes designed the General Motors Pavilion, known as Futurama, for the

1939 New York World's Fair The 1939–40 New York World's Fair was a world's fair held at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York, United States. It was the second-most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Pur ...

. For that famous and enormously influential installation, Bel Geddes exploited his earlier work in the same vein: he had designed a "Metropolis City of 1960" in 1936. Bel Geddes's book ''Magic Motorways'' (1940) promoted advances in highway design and transportation, foreshadowing the

Interstate Highway System The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. T ...

, along with aspects of driver assist and

autonomous driving A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for Sa ...

. The case for the Mark I computer was designed by Bel Geddes at IBM's expense, and put in place just in time for the machine's dedication at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

Death and legacy

Bel Geddes died in New York on May 8, 1958. His autobiography, ''Miracle in the Evening'', was published posthumously in 1960. Bel Geddes is a member of the

American Theater Hall of Fame The American Theater Hall of Fame in New York City was founded in 1972. Earl Blackwell was the first head of the organization's Executive Committee. In an announcement in 1972, he said that the new ''Theater Hall of Fame'' would be located in the ...

, a distinction he shares with his daughter, actress

. The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp honoring Bel Geddes as a "Pioneer Of American Industrial Design". The archive of Norman Bel Geddes is held by the

Harry Ransom Center The Harry Ransom Center (until 1983 the Humanities Research Center) is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the pu ...

at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. This large collection includes models, drafts, watercolor designs, research notes, project proposals, and correspondence. The Ransom Center also holds the papers of Bel Geddes' second wife, the noted costume designer and producer Edith Lutyens Bel Geddes.

Gallery

File:BelGeddesCar.jpg, Model of teardrop-shaped automobile designed by Bel Geddes File:General Motors 25th anniversary medal Norman Bel Geddes 1933.jpg, General Motors 25th anniversary medal, 1933, featuring teardrop shaped car File:Through the City of Tomorrow Without a Stop Shell Oil advertisement 1937.jpg, "Through the City of Tomorrow Without a Stop", Shell Oil advertisement, 1937. File:Norman Bel Geddes. Cocktail Set. 1937..jpg, Norman Bel Geddes. Cocktail Set. 1937.

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown ...

File:Street intersection Futurama.jpg, A full scale street intersection in the City of the Future at the Futurama exhibit at the

File:Emerson Model 400-3 Patriot (1940).jpg, Emerson Model 400-3 "Patriot" (1940) radio designed by Bel Geddes, made of

Catalin Catalin is a brand name for a thermosetting polymer developed and trademarked in 1927 by the American Catalin Corporation of New York City, when the patent on Bakelite expired that year. A phenol formaldehyde resin, it can be worked with files, ...

Selected publications

*
Horizons
' Little Brown, Boston, 1932.
"Streamlining"
''

Atlantic Monthly ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

'', No. 154 (November 1934), pp. 553–558. *
Magic Motorways
'. Random House, New York, 1940. *
Miracle in the Evening: An Autobiography
'. Doubleday, New York, 1960. Edited by William Kelley.

References and notes

External links

Norman Bel Geddes Archive
at the

* ''To New Horizons,'' film about Geddes' display at the 1939/40 World's Fair {{DEFAULTSORT:Bel Geddes, Norman 1893 births 1958 deaths 20th-century American artists American industrial designers People from Adrian, Michigan People from New Philadelphia, Ohio Artists from Michigan Artists from Ohio Algonquin Round Table