MODERN LIVING: Up from the Egg

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There were fine, luxurious new trains, buses, steamships and airliners built and abuilding. Designer Dreyfuss, who had conceived the New York Central's first modern 20th Century trains, had many a supermodern ocean liner interior on the boards. Designer Teague's cozy lounges, snack bars and dressing rooms were already aloft in Boeing's new Stratocruiser. Not even the U.S. toilet had been neglected. Thanks to Designer Dreyfuss and the Crane Co., it was now available in form-fitting shapes.

The New Frontiers. For all the work that had been done, there still remained vast, unexplored regions of ugliness and inefficiency for the U.S. industrial designer to tackle. Designer Loewy last week summed up a few of the challenges:

"The world is filled with archaic objects−mailboxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which look like places to break out of rather than places to enter.

"Noise is a parasite. Anything noisy is poorly designed. And taxicabs! Why should you crawl into a cab on your hands & knees and then be unable to get out of the deep seats once you get into them? Subways are dirty, noisy, unattractive. The American soda fountain is disgraceful ; anyone who has ever smelled the midsummer-night stink of a sloppy soda fountain−decayed hamburger, sour milk, mustard and vanilla−can never forget it. The same goes for a telephone booth. Must one be crowded into a cramped, unventilated closet, use a mouthpiece which has been breathed into by thousands of people? Why not a two-way loudspeaker instead? Lincoln Steffens advised his son, who was worrying about what remained to be done, that nobody had yet made a faucet that didn't leak. Well, it no longer leaks−but why not do something about the faucet itself? Is it necessary?"