Art: Designing Man

In the past 20 years, industrial designers have become a self-conscious coterie, well paid and well content with their mission : to save mankind from ugliness in man-made products. The work of such men as Henry Dreyfuss, Ward Bennett and Raymond Loewy in Manhattan and Eero Saarinen (who is both architect and designer) in Detroit has raised industrial design from a mechanical slough of vulgarity. For in the early years of mass production, the sound design of artisans gave way to the cheaply pretentious. The craftsmanlike simplicity of early American furniture was displaced...