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Reviewed by:
  • Design in the U.S.A.
  • Barry M. Katz (bio)
Design in the U.S.A. By Jeffrey L.Meikle . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 210. $24.95.

Jeffrey Meikle is an American historian who is interested in design, as opposed to a design historian who is interested in America. The distinction, while sometimes subtle, is crucial, and it accounts for the genuine contribution he is able to make to both fields in this excellent introductory survey.

The author of one of the first books to explore the culture of the founding generation of industrial designers, Twentieth Century Limited (1979), followed by an outstanding cultural history of American Plastic (1995), Meikle is conversant across both disciplines. His challenge in this book has been to steer a middle course between the thinly contextualized parade of "designer" objects that characterizes so much design scholarship and [End Page 862] straight-up cultural history that fails to read deeply into the intricacies of design practice itself. Within the constraints of a short book that fits the requirements of the Oxford History of Art series, he has done so admirably.

Beginning with a series of suitably abstract questions about the nature of design, Meikle presents his approach with deceptive simplicity: "Answers . . . must be sought outside the design process, in its relationships with larger historical structures and patterns" (p. 16). Accordingly, the book consists of five balanced chapters which relate more to the course of American history than to the superficial periodization imposed on many writers by their overreliance on style. Chapter 1, "The Emergence of the American System, 1790–1860," although the least coherent in terms of a unifying conception of design, sets the larger framework of the inquiry by describing the passage from "the intuitive intelligence of the craftsman" to "the rational intelligence of the mechanic" (p. 23). This concise characterization of the modernization of production is balanced by an analysis of the correlative modernization of consumption—styling, product differentiation, marketing—"whose symbiotic relationship to production identified them as a vital, equal aspect of the American System" (p. 36).

The complementarity of the "push" of a technologically dynamic production apparatus and the "pull" of culturally driven patterns of consumption helps to frame the remaining chapters. These examine the interplay of "Art and Industry in the Gilded Age, 1860–1918," during which time American design was heavily influenced by the opposing arguments of the English Arts and Crafts movement around William Morris and the South Kensington school whose most articulate spokesman was Christopher Dresser; "Designing the Machine Age, 1918–1940," when American designers pursued "a machine aesthetic that was both intellectually defensible and commercially viable" (p. 113); and finally the cold war era of "High Design versus Popular Styling, 1940–1965" and the digital passage "Into the Millennium." Meikle is attuned to the international context of American design, to the role of curators and journalists, and to gender issues, all of which he integrates into his survey in a manner that is compelling and strikingly unselfconscious.

Cramming a vast inventory of possible objects, institutions, individuals, and ideas into a short book is a daunting task, and Meikle has handled it with skill and discretion; he references skyscrapers, hotel interiors, furniture pieces, automotive grilles, kitchen appliances, museum exhibitions, consumer electronics, and digital typefaces without yielding to the temptation to write independent histories of any of them. Although omissions are an inevitable consequence of his approach, this reviewer cannot resist noting the absence from his survey of the great Silicon Valley consultancies, which have collectively transformed not only the products but, more importantly, the professional practice of American design over the last two decades.

Sweeping judgments and freewheeling critiques make Design in the U.S.A. provocative and engaging, even (perhaps especially) when they are [End Page 863] wrong (designers at the end of the high modernist era were clearly not "about to abandon the permanence of matter for the impermanence of images and information" [p. 172]). There is a skewing of the narrative in favor of the signed artifacts of named designers, and disparaging remarks about "design by committee" and the gray anonymity of corporate design offices abound, which tends...

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