From Bauhaus to Broadway: A Tubular Steel Bonanza!

This is a lecture intended for Week 7 of Fall 2012 History of Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design, and made impossible by Divine Intervention in the form of Hurricane Sandy. Watch it while you wait for the flood waters to recede...

Bauhaus designers explored purity of form, geometry, material integrity, and function to produce an entirely new aesthetic. Their functional rationalism was perfectly suited to tubular steel, and many of the most successful Bauhaus designs include metal tubing. 

Designers around the world were aware of the new ideas being explored in Germany. American designers, with a greater interest in manufacturing, and with an interest in consumer needs, incorporated some Bauhaus thinking, and LOTS of tubular steel, to create production furniture with less artistic integrity, but a much wider acceptance. The struggle to balance good design with ease of manufacture, and to include customer preferences, is visible in the goods produced by American Industrial Designers at this time.