This editorial appeared in Western Architect in 1924. Some of it was the standard generational lament, some of it was specific and accurate.
Is the world losing its sense of beauty? It would seem so. Has the ugliness of war, the unrest and delirium of peoples, destroyed all appreciation for things beautiful, and permeated all with a disregard for fineness of line? For it is in beautiful lines that Nature, the arch-goddess of Beauty, expresses herself.
War can have opposite effects. In Europe, devastated by WW1, the Brutalists took over and created even more ugliness. In America, tyrannized by Wilson but not bombed, a less ornate form of beauty was developing. Here’s a typical 1920s neighborhood with a PRE-1920 car, both showing simple grace.
Ordinary bungalows were nicely formed with graceful shapes inside. Skyscrapers followed the lines of cathedrals, extending the ogive and flying buttress ever upward.
In dress, the female form is flattened. Bosoms and hips to which Nature gave a pleasing curve are suppressed or obliterated, while woman’s glory, the hair, is shorn and the remnant frizzed like that of a South Sea islander. The ideal is to appear flat as a flounder.
After WW2, flounders were exactly reversed. Nothing but curves and tits on women, cars and appliances.
Men appear in public places in untidy dress, or in knickerbockers, without regard for the exposure of crooked legs; and a bobbed dinner coat is the epitome of “dress.”
Same old same old. Knickerbockers to gangsta shorts.
The sailing ship with her cloud of white canvas has been replaced by the standardized cargo boat built on lines that so-called marine architects perpetrated during the war, and which have not even the stability of the past to recommend them. In the hands of these same “designers” the curve and sheer that gave grace to the small sailing pleasure boat is gone, replaced by a straight flat line from stem to stern. The motorboat is usually a piano-box, sharp at one end, and like the sailboat, is without an attempt even to produce beauty of line.
Halfway accurate but late. Sailing ships were also developed for war, and steam replaced sails in the 1850s. By 1920 sailboats were purely for status display like today’s megayachts.
The automobile is built along similar lines, filled with smug people, females usually, who read letters while in full view of the fairest sunset or landscape that ever blessed the eyes of man.
Part of this was strictly accurate. Cars in the 20s were precisely identical and precisely square.
Modern lamenters have moved one step forward. Now we lament smug people, females usually, reading cellphones while ignoring letters.
Only one instance comes to our knowledge of an architect attempting to produce beauty of line in an automobile body, that vehicle which by its very ubiquity could influence standards of beauty in design more than any other save our buildings. Some twenty years ago there was a beautiful automobile on Chicago streets, said to have been designed by Charles Eli Fox. But this example of the adaptability of the auto body to lines of beauty was not followed, the world seemingly living in one dimension.
I can’t find this car online. A 1906 car mag mentions a Packard designed by Fox for his own use but doesn’t show it. I doubt that it was especially unique. In those first decades cars were continuing the coach tradition, with a mix of graceful curves and low lines.
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An ad in the same magazine raises a good question:
Single-room heaters with builtin fans became common in motels and schools, but never in houses. Why not? Forced-air furnaces are less efficient and less controllable than Heatovents. Each room has to accept the same temperature and the same timing of air movement. Each room also needs to return some air to the central unit. With central forced air your only option is to shut the register entirely, making the room too cold in winter and too hot in summer.
Polistra's Mill 