John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life by Danielle Shapiro (review)

Who was John Vassos (1898–1985)? According to Danielle Shapiro, he was a polymath—illustrator, author, innovator and, especially, product designer—whose work reflected and influenced modernism in the "American Century." A mid-century public would have known the results of his decades-long relationship with RCA; his designs for musical instruments and other vernacular items continue to be familiar today.

Vassos was often an outsider, and not only as an immigrant to the United States. He was born to parents of Greek heritage resident in the Ottoman Empire. Vassos worked as an independent consultant to industry; unlike his better-known industrial designer contemporaries Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, his companies did not outlast his presence. Nevertheless, Shapiro argues for Vassos's place alongside Loewy and Dreyfuss in the history of modernism in art, architecture, and design.

Shapiro presents Vassos's career as an overlapping series of engagements. Work as a window dresser and set designer foreshadows successes as an interior designer. Design assignments expand into a career as an illustrator, graphic designer, and painter. Books about the modern condition and its psychology, co-authored with his wife, develop from those experiences. These are the bases that inform Vassos's return to architecture and his shift into industrial design. His position as an independent product designer was a culmination of these experiences, and Shapiro discusses the gestation of his most iconic designs in detailed chapters. She concentrates on Vassos's work for RCA, and especially the new consumer media of radio and television.

Shapiro also uses this biography to address some basic questions in design studies. What is modern? What is the role of the designer in modernity? What is "good design" when objects have no historical antecedents? She rightfully emphasizes the importance of this last question to consumer objects such as radio receivers and televisions. It was not simply "what should these objects look like?" and "how should they function?" What is the role of design in novel items, in marketing them to the public and, ultimately, their sale?

Apparently, Vassos had several answers. His architectural interiors, including apartment designs for the industrial photographer Margaret Bourke White, and the Nedick's (New York) restaurant chain, were wholly modern, even futuristic. Other items, including radio and television consoles, presented their modernity and their functionality alongside items that lacked those goals. Shapiro shows his successful application of modern design theories to media components that had no prior accepted form or place in the living or family room. She catalogs his approach as both elitist and populist, accepting of both functionalist and ornamented products. Vassos's successes came from his ability to imagine objects that acknowledged their functions but did not seem alien in that mixed environment. In emphasizing category of work over chronology, Shapiro happily avoids the pitfalls of "and then he designed." Yet her approach creates analytical redundancies that complicate placement of Vassos's work alongside that of his contemporaries, or within the ongoing debates about the value of modernity that followed the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. As a result, Shapiro's presentation occasionally works against her argument for the broader significance of John Vassos and his accomplishments. Yes, as his design for the Nedick's restaurant chain shows, he could create an interior architecture that was futuristic in style and in its replicability, and yes, he specified Bakelite and other ultra-modern plastics for that build-out. Was he the only designer of modern interiors with such concerns at that time?

Vassos's approaches to work and his interests appear to make him very much a man of his moment. The conflicts of modernism are reflected in design choices, both deliberate and inadvertent. Should design, and especially industrial design, represent its time or transcend it? Must it represent the present at its best, or point to the future? Shapiro offers John Vassos as a person whose work and designs responded to these questions about modern...