Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Ellen Lupton and J Abbott Miller

technological

1992

Designers and writers Ellen Lupton and J Abbott Miller argue that the streamlined style of modernism emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen, particularly the hygienic use of non-porous materials. They discuss the ramifications of streamline design as a reflection of mass production and consumption overlaid with the intention of suppressing or denying evidence of bodily waste. In this text Lupton and Miller highlight pivotal moments in the recent history of kitchen and bathroom furnishings as a function of form, economy and hygiene standards to reveal the body's implication with commodity. As such, the interior is constituted to be a site heavily linked to industrialised practices, economies and form-consciousness.

early 20th century

Between 1890 and 1940, America's culture of consumption took its modern form: products were mass produced and mass distributed, designed to be purchased and rapidly replaced by a vast buying public. The same period saw the rise of the modern bathroom and kitchen as newly equipped spaces for administering bodily care. The bathroom became a laboratory for the management of biological waste, from urine and feces to hair, perspiration, dead skin, bad breath, finger nails, and other bodily excretions. The kitchen became a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large; the kitchen door is the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, outmoded appliances and other discarded products. By the phrase process of elimination we refer to the overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification. The streamlined style of modern design, which served the new ideals of bodily hygiene and the manufacturing policy of planned obsolescence, emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen. The organically modeled yet machine-made forms of streamlined objects collapsed the natural and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, into an aesthetic of waste.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century, various consumer goods, from packaging, appliances, and furniture to interior architecture, began to acquire a vigorous new physique: the plush fabrics, carved moldings and intricate decorations of Victorian domestic objects were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving

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way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges. This 'process of elimination' found its most extreme expression in the streamline styling of the 1930s, which borrowed the conical 'teardrop' from aerodynamics and applied it to countless immobile objects, from industrial equipment to electric waffle irons. Streamlining used bulbous forms with tapered ends and graphic 'speed whiskers' to invoke the rapid movement of an object through air or water. The mechanical devices of the industrial age, their elements assembled with visible nuts, bolts, belts and gears, surrendered to the new ideal of the object as a continuous, organic body, its moving parts hidden behind a seamless shell appearing to be molded out of a single piece of material.

We suggest that the fluid modeling of streamlined forms reflected the period's twin obsessions with bodily consumption and economic consumption. Streamlining was born of modern America's intensive focus on waste: on the one hand, its fascination with new products and regimes for managing the intimate processes of biological consumption, from food preparation to the disposal of human waste, and on the other hand, its euphoric celebration of planned obsolescence and an economy dependent on a cycle of continually discarded and replenished merchandise. Streamlining performed a surreal conflation of the organic and the mechanical: its seamless skins fluidly curved yet rigidly impervious to dirt and moisture. The molded form of streamlining yielded an excretory aesthetic, a material celebration of natural and cultural digestive cycles.

The flamboyant product designs of the 1930s were preceded by the more anonymous modernism of the bathroom and kitchen, which earlier had begun to replace heterogeneous collections of domestic equipment with continuous, coordinated ensembles, designed to administer a new technological regime of bodily care.

The bathroom as an architectural space did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century. In the pre-plumbing era, America's reluctant bathing customs revolved around portable containers – tubs, pails, chambers pots, and washstands – which were used in the kitchen or bedroom. As modern plumbing coordinated the delivery and removal of water and waste from the home, the toilet and tub assumed a necessarily fixed position in the home: they became fixtures. While early plumbed bathrooms maintained the decorative features of traditional domestic spaces – draperies, carpets, carved details – the 'modern' bathroom emerged at the turn of the century as an overtly industrial ensemble of porcelain-enameled equipment, with white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene.

The modernisation of the kitchen followed that of the bathroom, whose aesthetic of obsessive cleanliness resonates in the non-porous materials used for kitchen floors, walls and work surfaces in the 1910s and 20s, and in the gradual shift from free-standing appliances and storage units to boxy, built-in forms. Like the bathroom, the modern

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kitchen came to favor fixtures over furniture: the slender legs supporting individual units were absorbed into monolithic, built-in slabs which linked mechanical devices to work and storage cabinets. The modern kitchen emulated the unforgiving sparkle of the bathroom: it also reflected the production ideal of the modern factory, whose linear sequence of work stations enabled an unbroken flow of activity. This norm, which we call the continuous kitchen, was established by the end of the 1930s and still remains powerful today.

The changes in kitchen design were preceded by the rise of food packaging, a phenomenon which accelerated, in the 1880s, and soon dominated urban and suburban grocery sales across the US.¹ The food package encloses the product in a smooth, continuous skin, giving the organic, shapeless substance inside a clear geometric form. The package resists dirt, air and moisture, sealing off the product within, just as the shells of modern kitchen cabinetry and appliances would later enclose the tools and materials of the kitchen behind a seamless surface.

Packaging was a major force in the shift from locally-based agriculture to corporate food production around the turn of the century. By 1910, many brand names which remain 'household words' today were the trademarks of nationally distributed products, including Quaker Oats, Kellogg's Toasted Cornflakes, Heinz Ketchup and Campbell's Soup. Such manufactured personalities eased the transition between the traditional food store and the modern retail outlet, where packaging replaced the shopkeeper as the interface between consumer and product, endowing products with a graphic identity and a corporate address held accountable for defective goods.

Packaging provided a model for the early industrial design profession, whose pioneers extended the principles of advertising and packaging to the product itself.² The redesign of an object in the 1920s and 30s commonly involved its external package rather than its working parts. To 'streamline' a product often meant to enclose it with a hard new shell.

Streamlining metaphorically invoked a body gliding through fluid; it also served to accelerate a product through the cycle of purchase and disposal, stimulating sales and hastening the replacement of objects not yet worn out. The built-in disposability of food packaging became a paradigm for consumer goods more generally in the 1920s and 30s, extending a logic of digestion to durable objects. The policy of 'planned obsolescence' pictured the economy itself as a 'body,' whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion.

Advertising became a crucial lubricant for keeping this cycle regular, emerging as a powerful partner of mass distribution in the early twentieth century. Although it raised the cost of conducting business, advertising was defended as a laxative for hastening the

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flow of goods through the economy. Advertising created desire for new products and generated emotional differences between otherwise indistinguishable ones. It helped spread the emerging standards of hygiene, housekeeping, and nutrition by promoting new products that promised access to the rigorous ideals of modern bodily care.

A 'consumer economy' sells manufactured goods to a large populace through high-volume production, making individual items cheaper by selling a greater number.³ American designers and advertisers in the 1920s and 30s used the term 'consumption' in reference to 'durables' such as radios, furniture and clothing; the term's more literal reference, however, is to the food cycle: to consume is to devour, to eat in a voracious, gluttonous manner. To 'consume' an object is to destroy it in the process of implementing it, as fire 'consumes' a forest. The advertising executive, Ernest Elmo Calkins, wrote in 1932 that an urgent task of marketing is to make people 'use up' products that they formerly 'used:' cars and safety razors must be consumed like tooth paste or soda biscuits.⁴ Calkins thus compared the continual movement of goods through the economy with human digestion. To consume is to ingest and expel, to take in and lay waste. It is a process of elimination.

Giving voice to the ethos of disposal, the domestic theorist, Christine Frederick, employed the oxymoronic term 'creative waste' at the end of the 1920s to describe the housewife's moral obligation rhythmically to buy and discard products.⁵ Her phrase 'creative waste' elevated the garbage of consumer culture into a form of positive production, valuing the destruction and replacement of objects as a pleasurable and socially instrumental act. Frederick and other promoters of consumerism conceived of 'waste' not merely as an incidental by-product, a final residue, of the consumption cycle, but as a generative, necessary force. In the consumer economy, 'production' finds a place inside the process of consumption, a cycle that reiterates the body's own form of 'creative waste,' excrement.

Reflecting and reinforcing the consumer culture's positive valuation of waste was the shift of cooking, bathing and defecating from positions of invisibility to dominance in the home. Formerly relegated to the cellar, exiled to the outhouse, or merged with the bedroom, these functions came to command the most expensive and technologically advanced features of the modern dwelling, their disciplined aesthetic radiating outward as a standard for the rest of the home and its inhabitants. The new governance of the house by the marginalized functions of the bathroom and kitchen reflected a shifting relationship between architecture and what Reyner Banham has called 'another culture,' comprising plumbers and consulting engineers – a culture 'so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt.' Banham describes a historical rupture in the discourse of design in the eighteenth century that divorced the 'art' of architecture from the making and operating of buildings.⁶ We add to Banham's second culture the consumers – often female – who increasingly came to influence the shape of domestic space; the modern

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technologies of consumption directly address women's role in domestic life, a fact which both empowers and manipulates them.

In his essay on 'Infantile Sexuality,' Freud suggests that during a child's development, the sexual zones move from mouth to anus to genitals: the body is an open, relational field to be mapped and remapped into regions of desire.7 Although the genitals commonly are viewed as the 'natural,' healthy focus of sexual life, the mouth and the anus are the initial sites of erotic pleasure. Desire, Freud argued, leans on the alimentary functions; desire always works in conjunction with – and in excess of – need, which lends it energy and justification. Desire latches on to the biologically vital functions of digestion; at the same time, physical needs are transformed by their collaboration with desire, and can never again be reduced to simple utility.

We suggest that twentieth-century design gradually articulated the bathroom and kitchen as the erotogenic zones of the domestic body. While the parlor or living room is the home's symbolic heart – its 'proper' architectural focus – this center was displaced by the utilitarian regions of the bathroom and kitchen, which became concentrated zones for built-in construction details, costly appliances and on-going maternal maintenance.

The new standards for personal and domestic hygiene, born out of scientifically-based health reforms, rapidly exceeded the demands of utility; the functional 'need' for clean bodies and clean houses has fed the culture of consumption, by mapping out the human and architectural body as a marketplace for an endlessly regenerating inventory of products. Just as sexual pleasure is propped on the utilitarian processes of digestion, the restless desire for new goods builds upon the fetishized routines surrounding biological consumption.

In her reading of Marx's Capital, Elaine Scarry describes the relation of manufactured goods to the human body as a relation of reciprocity; every artifact recreates and extends the body. In a zero degree state of production, human beings consume only enough fuel to regenerate their physical tissues. The body takes in food to build and maintain its own structure; the organism itself is the product, yielded through the process of consumption. Production at a more advanced state involves consuming a broader range of materials to further extend the body: chairs supplement the skeleton, tools append the hands, clothing augments the skin. Furniture and houses are neither more nor less interior to the human body than the food it absorbs, nor are they fundamentally different from such sophisticated prosthetics as artificial lungs, eyes and kidneys.8 The consumption of manufactured things turns the body inside out, opening it up to and as the culture of objects.

For the product world of the early twentieth century, human digestion served as a metaphor for the economy as well as a territory to be colonized and rewritten by a wealth of new commodities. The consumerist body ingests and expels not only food – the

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prototypical object of consumption – but the full range of images and objects that pass through the cycle of manufacture, purchase, and disposal. In this process of elimination, the body itself is remade. (… p 9)

During the 1920s and 30s, the modern bathroom and kitchen consolidated out of disparate collections of furniture and appliances into coordinated structures built-in to their surroundings. The bathroom became a compact organism lodged at the core of the home, while the kitchen became a miniaturized, open plan factory. The bathroom and kitchen formed twin temples to the processes of elimination, offering technological environments for the care of biological and economic consumption. We suggest that streamlining, the design style which enveloped innumerable American products in the 1930s, took shape out of the compelling ethos of bodily hygiene and domestic discipline embodied in the modern bathroom and kitchen. The industrially finished yet organically modeled forms of streamlining functioned, in part, as an excretory aesthetic, a plastic celebration of waste.

The technical term streamline refers to the path of a particle in fluid as it passes beyond a solid body. The study of streamlining began in the late nineteenth century as part of the new science of aerodynamics. The verb to streamline, dating from 1913, means to design or construct with a streamline: to modernize, to organize, to make more efficient and simple.⁹

Streamlining initially was applied to aircraft, ships, locomotives and automobiles in order to reduce the friction encountered as the vehicle passes through air or water. It quickly became a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity,' applied to immobile objects for which aerodynamic engineering is more fictional than functional. Raymond Loewy's teardrop pencil sharpener of 1934 became a mythic object lesson in the misapplication of streamlining, cited by later critics as styling at its most absurdly theatrical.

The continuous, sculptural forms of streamlined objects seek to minimize mechanical joints and eliminate visible hinges, bolts and screws. This aspiration towards seamless construction was achieved by applying the processes of stamping, molding, and extrusion to metals and plastics such as steel, aluminum, bakelite and beetleware.¹⁰ Each of these techniques depends on the existence of a 'body' from which the finished product will take its shape. In stamping, a sheet of material is struck against an exterior form; in molding, a formless substance replicates the interior contours of a vessel; in extrusion, a malleable material is forced through a shaped aperture. Stamping, molding, and extrusion each impart a clear, definitive form to a shapeless material.

Streamlining generalizes an object, enveloping its constituent parts inside a continuous body. The industrial designers of the 1920s and 30s sculpted shells to conceal the mechanical organs of objects, initiating a distinction between inside and outside, structure

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and skin. Numerous examples of product design primarily engage the outer casing of a device, not its working parts; many industrial designers began their careers in packaging, a medium whose built-in disposability offered a model for the planned obsolescence of so-called 'durable' goods. The continual stylistic update of consumer items such as refrigerators, toasters and cars shortened their life span and ensured their rapid replacement by new models.

By masking the machine's internal operation, the designer domesticated and humanized it. Raymond Loewy was certainly aware of the bodily, anthropomorphic quality of his design; in his autobiography he invokes the body of Betty Grable, 'whose liver and kidneys are no doubt adorable, though I would rather have her with skin than without.'¹¹ Loewy courts a coy Freudianism by titling a chapter of his book 'Sex and the Locomotive,' and he reveals that it was on a train that he was first kissed; such phallic innuendos resurface in publicity shots of Loewy astride his steam engines.

Within the literature on streamlining, phallic symbolism is an accepted subtext: for example, the first chapter of The Streamlined Decade, by Donald Bush, is titled 'The Science of Penetration.' Streamlining's evocation of movement, agency and progress, and its propensity for tapered, conical and cylindrical forms, makes it a susceptible carrier for masculine sexual connotations.¹² Yet the reduction of streamlined imagery to a phallic theme overlooks another bodily process: the process of elimination. Streamlining presents a surreal conflation of the man-made and the natural; it yields industrial objects whose complex curvature conforms to notions of the organic rather than the mechanical. By engaging the system of deliberate obsolescence with forms that are biologically curved yet industrially hard and incorruptible – and products that are aggressively 'clean' yet designed to be thrown away – streamlining embodied an aesthetic of waste, a material style for expressing the logic of consumption.

In his 1918 essay on anal eroticism, Ernest Jones described two possible reactions to excrement, carried into adult life from childhood experiences of pleasure and shame around the act of defecation.¹³ One reaction, largely negative, results in disgust for all forms of waste, from dust, dirt, and soiled linen to wasted time. In behavior, the hatred of filth manifests itself in extreme stinginess, fastidiousness and organizational compulsiveness – a general 'withholding' or 'holding in.' This first reaction to dirt is expressed in modern design's imperative for cleanliness and enclosure, as evidenced, for example, in continuous kitchen cabinets, built-in bathtubs, seamless food packages, and streamlined office equipment. The modern obsession with dirt affirms filth even as its seeks to eradicate it: the attention to dust, sweat, bad breath, cooking odors, and the innumerable germs hiding in the cracks and crevices of the home was a process of objectification as well as elimination, making visible what had once been invisible, bringing to the surface impurities that once had passed unnoticed.

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Jones describes a second response to anal eroticism, which acts upon symbols of waste in a productive manner: here, waste becomes the material of art, generosity and a general 'giving out.' Similarly, in the enthusiastic vocabulary of consumerism, phrases like Christine Frederick's 'creative waste' elevated the rhythmic disposal of goods to a form of positive making. The seemingly 'natural' life cycle of objects was propelled forward by streamlining, whose organic yet industrial forms marked the coexistence of a fetishized cleanliness with an economy that was dependent on waste.

As Stuart Ewen has pointed out, the marketing and advertising industry was familiar with Freud's manifesto of sublimation, Civilization and its Discontents. For example, Egmont Arens noted in his 1932 text, Consumer Engineering that touch is one of the 'sublimated' senses of modern culture – touch is a primitive faculty that has been culturally supplanted by the more intellectual, 'objective' senses of sight and sound. Arens encouraged designers of products and packages to appeal to the forgotten pleasures of tactility.¹⁴ The sense of touch demands direct contact between body and product; like taste and smell, touch incorporates the object of perception – physically consuming it – rather than observing it from a neutral distance.

We argue that modern design's appeal to the sublimated sense of touch participated in a larger excretory aesthetic. As described by Sandor Ferenczi, tactility is part of a child's pleasure in handling his or her own feces. Excrement, a convenient but socially offensive toy, is displaced during the child's development by a series of progressively abstract substances: from clay, sand, and rubber to pebbles, marbles and coins.¹⁵ The organically curved yet slick, impenetrable surfaces of streamlined merchandise embody a similar progression from soft to hard, dull to shiny, porous to non-porous, formless to formal. The prototypes for streamlined products typically were molded out of clay and then cast or stamped out of metal or plastic. Each object thus narrates a transformation from pliable, organic matter to a rigid, impenetrable form impervious to change and resistant to grime. The hard surface of the finished product retains the direct trace of its soft, globular origins, lodged in its contours like a childhood memory.

Raymond Loewy's much maligned pencil sharpener expresses a contradictory aesthetic of waste: its bulbous form reflects a pleasure in manipulating plastic matter, as well as a fastidious interest in hiding a messy interior behind the hard, clean physique of a 'streamlined' body. Loewy's pencil sharpener born out of soft, dull clay and then cast into a hard, shiny rigid, recalls the biological extrusions of feces, the child's first work of art; by engaging the policy of planned obsolescence, the pencil sharpener participated in the cycle of economic consumption as well. Streamlining conflates the life of the product with the life of the body, compacting into one form the processes of elimination: biological, economic, and stylistic. (… p 69)

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Notes

1 On the rise of corporate food industries, see Alfred D Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge), 1977. On the American diet, see Harvey A Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, Oxford University Press (New York), 1988.

2 On the industrial design profession, see Arthur Pulos, American Design Ethic, MIT Press (Cambridge), 1983.

3 The ideology of consumerism is summarized and celebrated in Daniel J Boorstin, 'Welcome to the Consumption Community', Fortune, 76, 1967, pp 118–38. On social critiques of consumerism, see Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Towards the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940, John Hopkins University Press (Baltimore), 1985. For essays on the development of American consumerism, see T Jackson Lears (ed), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, Pantheon (New York), 1983. On scholarly approaches to the origins and interpretation of consumption, see Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Goods and Activities, Indiana University Press (Bloomington), 1988.

4 Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, Consumer Engineering, A New Technique for Prosperity, Harper Brothers (New York), 1932, p 32.

5 Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer, The Business Bourse (New York), 1929, p 81.

6 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment [1969], University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 1984, p 9.

7 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Basic Books (New York), 1962, pp 39–72.

8 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press (New York), 1985.

9 On the origins of streamlining, see Donald J Bush, The Streamlined Decade, George Braziller (New York), 1975, and Harold van Doren, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide, McGraw-Hill Book Company (New York), 1940, pp 137–52. On American industrial design, see Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H Pilgrim and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918–1941, Brooklyn Museum (New York), 1986, and Jeffrey L Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939, Temple University Press (Philadelphia), 1979.

10 Clark N Robinson, Meet the Plastics, MacMillan Company (New York), 1949, and J Beresford-Evans, 'British Industrial Plastics Limited', Design, no 60, December 1953, pp 11–17.

11 Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone, Simon and Schuster (New York), 1951, p 220.

12 Richard Pommer acknowledges the sexual, yet strictly phallic implications of streamlining in 'Loewy and the Industrial Skin Game', Art in America, March/April 1976, pp 46–7.

13 Ernest Jones, 'Anal-Erotic Character Traits', Papers on Psycho-Analysis [1918], Beacon (New York), 1961, pp 413–37.

14 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images, Basic Books (New York), 1988, p 49.

15 Sandor Ferenczi, 'The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money', Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, Sex in Psycho-Analysis [1914], Dover (New York), 1956, pp 269–77.

Ellen Lupton and J Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination: MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Center (Cambridge Mass). Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Excerpts pp 1–9, 65–9)

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