Streamlining

Definition

Streamlining is the 1930s American design style that clothed products — from locomotives to electric waffle irons — in "the conical 'teardrop' from aerodynamics," bulbous forms with tapered ends and graphic "speed whiskers" that "invoke the rapid movement of an object through air or water" (Lupton & Miller, p. 205). Its technical core is real: "The technical term streamline refers to the path of a particle in fluid as it passes beyond a solid body," a concept from late-nineteenth-century aerodynamics, applied first to "aircraft, ships, locomotives and automobiles in order to reduce the friction encountered as the vehicle passes through air or water" (p. 209). The verb to streamline dates from 1913 and means "to design or construct with a streamline: to modernize, to organize, to make more efficient and simple" (p. 209). But on immobile products the aerodynamics is "more fictional than functional": streamlining "quickly became a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity'" (p. 209) — speed as style, not as physics. Its constructional signature is the seamless shell: stamping, molding and extrusion, each "depend[ent] on the existence of a 'body' from which the finished product will take its shape," produced 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" (pp. 205, 209) — "initiating a distinction between inside and outside, structure and skin" (pp. 209–210).

The concept's theoretical weight in this wiki comes from Lupton and Miller's thesis: streamlining's fluid modelling "reflected the period's twin obsessions with bodily consumption and economic consumption" — it "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" (p. 205). Streamlining is thus the visible style of the process-of-elimination: "an aesthetic of waste, a material style for expressing the logic of consumption" (p. 210). "By masking the machine's internal operation, the designer domesticated and humanized it" (p. 210) — the shell as both hygiene (nothing to catch dirt) and sales device ("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," p. 210). Raymond Loewy's teardrop pencil sharpener (1934) is the style's "mythic object lesson in the misapplication of streamlining, cited by later critics as styling at its most absurdly theatrical" (p. 209; see kitsch) — and, on Lupton & Miller's re-reading, its most truthful object: molded in clay, cast in hard shiny metal, it "recalls the biological extrusions of feces, the child's first work of art" (p. 211).

Key Thinkers

• Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the concept's theorists: the excretory-aesthetic thesis, the packaging genealogy, the Jones/Ferenczi psychoanalytic mechanism, and the redirection of the phallic reading toward "the process of elimination" (1992/2006).
• Raymond Loewy — the style's practitioner and its anthropomorphic self-theorist: the pencil sharpener, the Betty Grable defence of the skin ("whose liver and kidneys are no doubt adorable, though I would rather have her with skin than without"), the "Sex and the Locomotive" chapter (not yet paged — see log).
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Donald J. Bush, The Streamlined Decade (1975) — the phallic-reading locus ("The Science of Penetration"); Harold van Doren, Industrial Design (1940); Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited (1979).)

Related Concepts

• process-of-elimination — the master concept streamlining materializes: digestion, consumption and simplification as one overlapping pattern; the "excretory aesthetic."
• dromology — speed's civilian-consumer form: "a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity'" applied to objects that do not move; "speed whiskers" as decorative speed. Where Virilio's speed is power's logistics, streamlining is speed's merchandising.
• style — streamlining as style-theory case: a style born from engineering transfer (aerodynamics → product skin), marketing (the stylistic update) and bodily metaphor; "the more anonymous modernism of the bathroom and kitchen" preceded its flamboyant 1930s product form (p. 205).
• machine-for-living — the shell's domestication of the machine: "By masking the machine's internal operation, the designer domesticated and humanized it" — the house's machine-terms applied to products; the reverse of Morey & Alkanoglu's car-as-technology renaming.
• obsolescence — streamlining's economic function: "to accelerate a product through the cycle of purchase and disposal, stimulating sales and hastening the replacement of objects not yet worn out" (p. 206); the built form of planned obsolescence.
• fabrication — the object-scale analogue of Manack's fabrication thesis: the interior concealed, the shell exhibited; "initiating a distinction between inside and outside, structure and skin."
• inside-outside-dialectic — the shell as the dialectic's product-scale form: the mechanical organs inside, the organic body outside.
• kitsch — the critical verdict the style collected ("styling at its most absurdly theatrical") — the modernist diagnostic applied to streamlining.
• consumerism — the system the style served: packaging as its model, advertising as its "lubricant," the "consumer economy" as its ground (see Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the founding source: the teardrop borrowed from aerodynamics and "applied to countless immobile objects, from industrial equipment to electric waffle irons" (p. 205); the speed-whisker vocabulary; the seamless-shell construction via stamping, molding, extrusion; the packaging genealogy ("Packaging provided a model for the early industrial design profession," p. 206); the excretory aesthetic; Loewy's sharpener and the psychoanalytic double reading; the phallic-reading redirection. See process-of-elimination, creative-waste, bathroom.

Open Questions

• Streamlining is "a stylistic code evoking 'speed'" on objects that do not move — is this dromology's purest consumer case (speed as sign-value detached from any vehicle), and does the "speed whisker" make Virilio's dromocratic aesthetic available to any kitchen appliance?
• The style "collapsed the natural and the artificial… into an aesthetic of waste" (p. 204): is the organic curve the image of nature on an industrial body — and how does this differ from hypernaturalization's contemporary attempt to make the interior literally living? Streamlining performs nature; hypernaturalization engineers it.
• Is the seamless shell the twentieth century's decisive object-formation — the move that created "a distinction between inside and outside, structure and skin" for products as modernist architecture's free plan created it for buildings? Does the shell's later career (the performative envelope, Vanucci) return to the same formation?
• If prototypes were "molded out of clay and then cast or stamped out of metal" (p. 211), then every streamlined object carries a two-stage history: the soft originary model and the hard final skin. Is this the design equivalent of the sketch→building relation — and does digital fabrication (Manack's "increased modes of spatial articulation") dissolve or preserve the clay/steel sequence?