Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste

Author: Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint of the essay from The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA, 1992; © 1992 MIT List Visual Arts Center; Intimus excerpts pp. 1–9, 65–69 of the original; Intimus pp. 204–213) Source type: chapter (from Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 204–213) Raw file: raw/chapters/lupton-miller-2006-streamlining.md

Summary

Lupton and Miller argue that streamlining — the 1930s design style of teardrops, speed whiskers and seamless shells — "emanated from the domestic landscape of the bathroom and kitchen," and that it constitutes an "aesthetic of waste": the material expression of the overlapping "processes of elimination" by which biological digestion, economic consumption and aesthetic simplification converged in American design between 1890 and 1940. The modern bathroom became "a laboratory for the management of biological waste" and the kitchen "a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large"; packaging supplied the industrial-design profession's founding model; planned obsolescence pictured the economy itself as a body "whose good health depends on a continual cycle of production and waste, ingestion and excretion." Through Freud, Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi, the authors read streamlined forms as the design of anal-eroticism's twin reactions — fastidious withholding (cleanliness, enclosure, the seamless shell) and productive "giving out" (Christine Frederick's "creative waste") — with prototypes molded in clay and cast in metal as the child's progression "from soft to hard, dull to shiny, porous to non-porous." The interior here is constituted as the site where the body, the economy and the style meet: "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."

Key Claims

The essay's master concept is the process of elimination: "the overlapping patterns of biological digestion, economic consumption, and aesthetic simplification" — three eliminations (food→waste, purchase→discard, ornament→smoothness) converging in one design history. 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," and the same period saw the rise of the modern bathroom and kitchen (p. 204).
The bathroom and kitchen as the organs of consumption: "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" (p. 204).
Hygiene as the engine of modernism's simplification: "the plush fabrics, carved moldings and intricate decorations of Victorian domestic objects were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges" (pp. 204–205) — the anti-ornament move given a sanitary (not merely moral) motive.
Streamlining's technical origin and its fiction: the "streamline" is "the path of a particle in fluid as it passes beyond a solid body" (late-nineteenth-century aerodynamics); the verb "to streamline" dates from 1913, meaning "to modernize, to organize, to make more efficient and simple." Applied first to vehicles to reduce friction, it "quickly became a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity,' applied to immobile objects for which aerodynamic engineering is more fictional than functional" (pp. 205, 209).
Streamlining as the collapse of natural and artificial: "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" (p. 204); "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" (p. 205).
The bathroom's architectural birth: "The bathroom as an architectural space did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century" — pre-plumbing bathing customs "revolved around portable containers – tubs, pails, chambers pots, and washstands"; as plumbing coordinated water and waste delivery, "the toilet and tub assumed a necessarily fixed position in the home: they became fixtures." The 'modern' bathroom emerged "as an overtly industrial ensemble of porcelain-enameled equipment, with white, washable surfaces that reflected contemporary theories of hygiene" (p. 205).
The continuous kitchen: kitchen modernization followed the bathroom's "aesthetic of obsessive cleanliness"; "the slender legs supporting individual units were absorbed into monolithic, built-in slabs"; the kitchen "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" (pp. 205–206).
Packaging as the model of modern design: the food package (accelerating from the 1880s) "encloses the product in a smooth, continuous skin, giving the organic, shapeless substance inside a clear geometric form" — and "just as the shells of modern kitchen cabinetry and appliances would later enclose the tools and materials of the kitchen behind a seamless surface" (p. 206). "Packaging provided a model for the early industrial design profession… To 'streamline' a product often meant to enclose it with a hard new shell" (p. 206).
The brand as interface: by 1910 brand names (Quaker Oats, Kellogg's Toasted Cornflakes, Heinz Ketchup, Campbell's Soup) were "household words"; "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 was "a major force in the shift from locally-based agriculture to corporate food production" (p. 206).
Planned obsolescence as the economy-as-body: streamlining "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 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" (p. 206).
Advertising as laxative: "Advertising became a crucial lubricant for keeping this cycle regular… advertising was defended as a laxative for hastening the flow of goods through the economy. Advertising created desire for new products and generated emotional differences between otherwise indistinguishable ones" (pp. 206–207).
The etymology of consumption: American designers and advertisers used 'consumption' for durables, "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" — advertising executive Ernest Elmo Calkins (1932): "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. To consume is to ingest and expel, to take in and lay waste. It is a process of elimination" (p. 207).
Creative waste: domestic theorist Christine Frederick's "oxymoronic term 'creative waste' at the end of the 1920s… described the housewife's moral obligation rhythmically to buy and discard products. Her phrase 'creative waste' elevated the garbage of consumer culture into a form of positive production… 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" (p. 207).
The marginalized functions' conquest of the house: "the shift of cooking, bathing and defecating from positions of invisibility to dominance in the home… 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" (p. 207).
Banham's second culture, plus consumers: the bathroom/kitchen regime reflects a shifting relation 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'" (from The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, 1969). The authors add "to Banham's second culture the consumers – often female – who increasingly came to influence the shape of domestic space; the modern technologies of consumption directly address women's role in domestic life, a fact which both empowers and manipulates them" (pp. 207–208).
Freud's erotogenic map of the domestic body: via 'Infantile Sexuality' — "the body is an open, relational field to be mapped and remapped into regions of desire"; desire "always works in conjunction with – and in excess of – need." "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" (p. 208).
Hygiene beyond utility feeds consumption: "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" (p. 208).
Scarry's reciprocity: via Elaine Scarry's reading of Marx's Capital: "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… The consumption of manufactured things turns the body inside out, opening it up to and as the culture of objects" (p. 208).
The twin temples: "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" (p. 209).
Loewy and the anthropomorphic shell: Raymond Loewy's teardrop pencil sharpener (1934) "became a mythic object lesson in the misapplication of streamlining, cited by later critics as styling at its most absurdly theatrical." 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'" (pp. 209–210).
The skin/structure distinction: stamping, molding and extrusion (metals and plastics — steel, aluminum, bakelite, beetleware) each "depend on the existence of a 'body' from which the finished product will take its shape"; "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 and skin" (pp. 209–210). "By masking the machine's internal operation, the designer domesticated and humanized it" (p. 210).
Beyond the phallic reading: phallic symbolism is an "accepted subtext" in streamlining literature (Donald Bush's "The Science of Penetration") — "Yet the reduction of streamlined imagery to a phallic theme overlooks another bodily process: the process of elimination" (p. 210).
Jones's two reactions to excrement as design theory: Ernest Jones (1918) on anal eroticism: reaction one, "largely negative, results in disgust for all forms of waste… manifested… in extreme stinginess, fastidiousness and organizational compulsiveness – a general 'withholding' or 'holding in'" — "expressed in modern design's imperative for cleanliness and enclosure, as evidenced… in continuous kitchen cabinets, built-in bathtubs, seamless food packages, and streamlined office equipment." Reaction two "acts upon symbols of waste in a productive manner: here, waste becomes the material of art, generosity and a general 'giving out'" (pp. 210–211). "The modern obsession with dirt affirms filth even as it 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" (p. 210).
Touch as sublimated sense: via Stuart Ewen, the advertising industry knew Freud's Civilization and its Discontents; Egmont Arens (Consumer Engineering, 1932) noted "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," and "encouraged designers of products and packages to appeal to the forgotten pleasures of tactility… 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" (p. 211).
Ferenczi's clay-to-metal genealogy of the industrial prototype: tactility as part of the child's pleasure in handling feces; excrement "is displaced during the child's development by a series of progressively abstract substances: from clay, sand, and rubber to pebbles, marbles and coins." "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… The hard surface of the finished product retains the direct trace of its soft, globular origins, lodged in its contours like a childhood memory" (p. 211).
The pencil sharpener's double reading: "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… 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" (p. 211).

Connections

Concepts: streamlining, process-of-elimination, bathroom, creative-waste, kitchen, consumerism, obsolescence, novelty, mechanization, machine-for-living, style, dromology, whiteness, domestic-interior, modernism, design-reform, simplicity, kitsch, psychoanalysis, optic-haptic-perception, separate-spheres, gender-and-the-interior, fabrication, inside-outside-dialectic, taste

Authors: lupton-ellen, miller-j-abbott, taylor-mark-preston-julieanna, freud-sigmund, banham-reyner

Debates: ornament-vs-purity, interior-design-vs-architecture

Related source notes: Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the consumer position gendered at birth, which this essay's "consumers – often female" register extends into the appliance era; Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the kitchen/dining pair as modernism's domestic test case and the manifest/latent functions of domestic possessions; A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the domestic-economy program whose kitchen the "continuous kitchen" industrializes; The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture (Chase 1991) — consumerist architecture's American genealogy, whose prehistory this essay supplies at object scale; Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the other Stud-lineage psychoanalytic reading of a utilitarian interior (the bathroom's public twin); The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) — consumption's other register: tactical use against the system this essay diagnoses; From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the contemporaneous Viennese version of design's hygiene/cleanliness modernism at the opposite stylistic pole (botanical ornament vs. seamless shell)

Direct Quotes

"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." (p. 204)

"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." (p. 204)

"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." (p. 204)

"the plush fabrics, carved moldings and intricate decorations of Victorian domestic objects were rejected as dangerous breeding grounds for germs and dust, giving way to non-porous materials, flush surfaces and rounded edges." (pp. 204–205)

"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." (p. 205)

"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." (p. 205)

"The bathroom as an architectural space did not exist prior to the late nineteenth century." (p. 205)

"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." (p. 205)

"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." (p. 206)

"The food package encloses the product in a smooth, continuous skin, giving the organic, shapeless substance inside a clear geometric form." (p. 206)

"Packaging provided a model for the early industrial design profession, whose pioneers extended the principles of advertising and packaging to the product itself. 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." (p. 206)

"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." (p. 206)

"advertising was defended as a laxative for hastening the flow of goods through the economy." (pp. 206–207)

"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." (p. 207)

"To consume is to ingest and expel, to take in and lay waste. It is a process of elimination." (p. 207)

"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." (p. 207)

"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." (p. 207)

"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." (p. 207)

"the shift of cooking, bathing and defecating from positions of invisibility to dominance in the home… 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." (p. 207)

"We add to Banham's second culture the consumers – often female – who increasingly came to influence the shape of domestic space; the modern technologies of consumption directly address women's role in domestic life, a fact which both empowers and manipulates them." (pp. 207–208)

"We suggest that twentieth-century design gradually articulated the bathroom and kitchen as the erotogenic zones of the domestic body." (p. 208)

"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." (p. 208)

"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." (p. 208 — Scarry, relayed)

"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." (p. 209)

"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." (p. 209)

"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 and skin." (pp. 209–210)

"By masking the machine's internal operation, the designer domesticated and humanized it." (p. 210)

"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.'" (p. 210 — Loewy, quoted)

"Yet the reduction of streamlined imagery to a phallic theme overlooks another bodily process: the process of elimination." (p. 210)

"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." (p. 210)

"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." (p. 211)

"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." (p. 211)

"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." (p. 211)

"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." (p. 211)

"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. 211)

Open Questions

The essay claims hygiene "rapidly exceeded the demands of utility" (p. 208) — cleanliness became a marketplace engine. Is this a diagnosis of consumer culture's exploitation of hygiene, or of hygiene's constitutive insatiability? Where is the line between a legitimate sanitary standard and the fetishized cleanliness that "affirms filth even as it seeks to eradicate it" (p. 210)?
"Creative waste" made disposal a "moral obligation" of the housewife (p. 207) — does the gendering of consumption's engine (see consumerism's Gordon register) mean the throwaway economy was built on women's disciplined labor twice over (housework and disciplined replacement)? And do the authors' "both empowers and manipulates" (pp. 207–208) hold together, or does one term collapse into the other?
The essay redirects streamlining's symbolism from the phallic ("The Science of Penetration," p. 210) to the anal-erotic ("the process of elimination"). Does the redirection fully succeed — or do both readings share the assumption that a style's meaning is a displaced bodily content, a premise a semiotic or formalist account of streamlining would refuse?
The "continuous kitchen" norm "established by the end of the 1930s… still remains powerful today" (p. 206). Lawrence (1987/2006) charges modernism's kitchen with aesthetic resolution without demographic adaptability — is the continuous kitchen the fixture-form of the same failure, an unbroken flow that fixes the cook in the factory's sequence? See kitchen, flexible-interior.
The essay's psychoanalytic mechanism (Jones's two reactions; Ferenczi's substance-progression) is offered as historical explanation, not metaphor: prototypes "molded out of clay… lodged… like a childhood memory" (p. 211). Can a design history be psychoanalytic in this strong sense — the style itself as symptom — or does the essay's wit outrun its evidence? See psychoanalysis.
The excerpt is heavily elided ("(… p 9)", "(… p 69)"); the original book (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992; Princeton Architectural Press book edition 1996/97) contains the exhibition material, the case studies of specific kitchens and bathrooms, and the conclusion between the excerpted pp. 1–9 and 65–69. What arguments fall in the gap?