 The Promotion of Lifestyle
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Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando in The Wild One epitomized the rebellious youth of the 1950s.
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With the Arcadian and Utopian idea continually before him, the average American considers the ideal living conditions to be such as will allow him a maximum of space in an individual home, preferably in the suburbs. Beginning with the town of Pullman, founded in 1880 at Gary, Indiana, there rose in America several privately planned suburban real-estate developments.
Following that start, a number of industrial towns like Walpole, Massachusetts, and Overlook County Colony, planned for the General Chemical Company near Wilmington, Delaware, were patterned after Letchworth, the first garden city of England, Tours in France, or Emden in Germany.
During the World War I and shortly afterward a number of industrial villages were planned by the federal government. Three, in particular, deserve mention: Union Park Gardens, Wilmington, Delaware, built for shipworkers; one near Bridgeport, Connecticut, for munitions workers; and Yorkship Village near Camden, New Jersey. These garden cities are so arranged that houses and apartments are convenient to through traffic streets and car lines without being directly on them.
Each town has a community center with school, city hall, stores, and recreation areas. Considerable attention is given in all these projects to landscaping, the houses being arranged in irregular building lines along curved roadways, so that the owner of each, on approaching his home, gains a distinctive pictorial impression.
The suburban consumer of the 1950s clearly had more money to spend on goods, and more goods from which to choose, than ever before, and consumption responded less and less to basic utilitarian needs and more and more to the exigencies of status and comfort.
A firm emphasis was placed on the family as the main unit of consumption, with the mother/housewife making all the consumption choices. Household goods played, increasingly, the most important role in establishing social status.
In this orgy of consumption, objects became intricately linked with the concept of lifestyle. Their strictly utilitarian value was far outstripped by the way in which they provided a means of making the suburban family part of the cornmunity. As the home became, increasingly, the focus for a way of living and consuming, the objects consumed became "marks of belonging".
The emerging Contemporary style for the domestic interior was characterized by a new use of materials, particularly aluminum and plastics, a love of color and pattern, an overall lightness and humanism and a delight in variation. Manufacturing companies and retail outlets, such as Ernest Race Limited, Hille, Heals, and Dunns of Bromley, capitalized on the new optimistic spirit, commissioning items from the new postwar generation of designers - among them Clive Latimer and Robin and Lucienne Day - who could clearly see that the only way ahead was to create a new, modem, expressiye esthetic to herald the "new age".
Detroit, Cleveland, and New York have begun the construction of a number of community apartment houses like the Karl Marx Apartment in Vienna, which will eventually give to the underprivileged classes rooms renting from six to ten dollars a month. In some cases, trade guilds such as the Stocking Makers' Union in Philadelphia and the Tailors' Union in New York City have undertaken the construction of well-equipped apartments to rent for reasonable rates.
These apartments are planned with outside windows. They have good cross ventilation, a modicum of privacy, standardized sanitary and heating equipment. Some have balconies, porches, and roof facilities for sunshine and recreation. In their fireproof construction, the newest types of insulated noiseproof walls and in some cases glass bricks are being used. A comparison of any of these examples with any slum will convince one that only from such surroundings as those provided by these new, clean homes can we hope to gain a healthy democracy, capable of producing an art of refinement and distinction. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and beauty rarely comes from homes of squalor.
On the one hand, the rapid growth of mass consumption, and the overt materialism of that decade, gave rise to a sudden proliferation of popular symbolism in the environment, expressed most strongly in that status symbol to beat all status symbols - the American automobile.
On the other, the design establishment in the United States sought to show that it was as capable of understanding "good design" and "good taste" as the European modern design movements. Two clear design cuItures emerged in the USA at this time, one firmly entrenched within the context of the commercial world and expressed most dramatically through the practices of object obsolescence and product styling, the other considerably more elitist, highminded, resistant to the popular appeal of commercial values, and finding its chief outlets in the more traditional areas of furniture and the applied arts.
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1945 - 1960
Periods
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