John Vassos : industrial design for modern life / Danielle Shapiro.
Shapiro, Danielle, 1968- author.
2016
TS140.V37 S53 2016eb
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Title John Vassos : industrial design for modern life / Danielle Shapiro.
Author Shapiro, Danielle, 1968- author.
ISBN 9781452951744 (electronic book)
9780816693405
9780816693412
Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Copyright ©2016
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xvii, 274 pages) : illustrations
Call Number TS140.V37 S53 2016eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 745.2092
Summary "What should a television look like? How should a dial on a radio feel to the touch? These were questions John Vassos asked when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) asked him to design the first mass-produced television receiver, the TRK-12, which had its spectacular premier at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Vassos emigrated from Greece and arrived in the United States in 1919. His career spans the evolution of central forms of mass media in the twentieth century and offers a template for understanding their success. This is Vassos's legacy--shaping the way we interact with our media technologies. Other industrial designers may be more celebrated, but none were more focused on making radio and television attractive and accessible to millions of Americans. In John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life, Danielle Shapiro is the first to examine the life and work of RCA's key consultant designer through the rise of radio and television and into the computer era. Vassos conceived a vision for the look of new technologies still with us today. A founder of the Industrial Designers Society of America, he was instrumental in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s and into the postwar period. Drawing on unpublished records and correspondence, Shapiro creates a portrait of a designer whose early artistic work in books like Phobia and Contempo critiqued the commercialization of modern life but whose later design work sought to accommodate it. Replete with rich behind-the-product stories of America's design culture in the 1930s through the 1950s, this volume also chronicles the emergence of what was to become the nation's largest media company and provides a fascinating glimpse into its early corporate culture. In our current era of watching TV on an iPod or a smartphone, Shapiro stimulates broad discussions of the meaning of technological design for mass media in daily life."-- Provided by publisher.
Note Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. 2005.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form John Vassos.
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Introduction: Creating Design We Can Live With
1. Drawing Modernity: Advertising and Book Illustrations
2. Becoming an Industrial Designer
3. Modernizing the Home through Radio
4. Designed for Electricity: Vassos's Architectural Interiors
5. Vassos and RCA: Money, Media, and Modernism
6. The TRK-12: RCA's First Mass-Marketed Television Receiver
7. John Vassos in Postwar America
Conclusion: The Legacy of John Vassos.

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