The Bathroom Beautiful

To the average man modern architecture, modern furniture, modern city planning suggest depressing acres of window-pitted, slablike walls, rooms like hospital wards, cubical stacks of identically planned apartments, chairs of undernourished metalwork, "housing" developments that resemble mass-produced jails. He is apt to forget such examples of perfect, modern design as the airplane, the suspension bridge, the ocean liner.

One modernist who sympathizes with the average man's horror of most modernistic building is Walter Dorwin Teague,an ace industrial designer who last week published a discursive, philosophical book (Design This Day--Harcourt Brace--$6) on the present and future of design. To Designer Teague the industrial Revolution has been the bloodiest revolution of all.

Today, says Teague, "... We find ourselves at the end of a long term that has been very much like war: a century and a half of turmoil and confusion, suffering and bleak unloveliness, a turbulent period filled with the unhappiness that is inevitable when basic readjustments of human living are being effected.

. . . There was [for example] a generation or two that suffered from Watt's steam engine more frightfully than any people suffered from the first World War." In the field of design the revolution has been as wasteful, haphazard and painful as it has in economics or politics, principally because man is still merely fumbling with the brand-new set of complicated tools modern technology has given him. Today's designers, working laboriously by trial & error, are creating the semisavage "primitives" of the machine age.

Some of these primitives--the Douglas transport plane, the modern bathroom, gas range, and washing machine--are pretty good, pretty well suited to their purposes. But designers of buildings, says Mr. Teague, still think in terms of cathedrals, designers of cars in terms of carriages. In a well-integrated period, thinks Designer Teague, all art is "applied art," and the finest craftsmen devote themselves to beautifying the things people use in their daily lives.

Bald, cob-nosed Designer Teague has been beautifying machine-age gadgets ever since 1928, when Eastman Kodak Co. hired him to spiffy up its then drab-looking cameras. From cameras. Teague went on to magnifying glasses, mirrors, telescopes, binoculars. Steuben glassware.

Pyrex ovenware, boilers, mimeograph machines. His car-body designs for the Marmon 16 in 1930 set a whole new style in automobile streamlining. Today, a consultant on everything from railroad coaches to pickle bottles, Walter Dorwin Teague is one of the half-dozen crack U. S. industrial designers. In his Clinton, N. J. farmhouse, Designer Teague gives himself a change of pace with early-American furniture.

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