EVERYDAY MODERN: THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN OF ALFONSO IANNELLI by David Jameson
Details the stories of his appliance and manufacturing clients to the 1950s in this compilation from 2015. 2015 | Paperback | 172 pages | $45.00 | ISBN 978-0990992134 |
Afonso Iannelli was like a Renaissance artist marooned in the 20th century. Instead of creating altarpieces and carving saints, he put his creative energies in the 1930s through the 1950s into the design of electric knife sharpeners, coffee makers, and drink mixers. But Iannelli’s appliances look different from the machined forms of his fellow industrial designers perhaps because he first sculpted statues in clay while he was still a young artist. They may have been manufactured in shiny steel and chrome but they possess the tactile feel and ergonomics of a living object. In 1926, Iannelli’s design for a new logo for the boxes for Sunbeam appliances of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company may have started rolling the ball for appliance design in his Studio’s direction. From 1931 on, Alfonso Iannelli and his Studios were designing, building, and supervising pavilions and exhibits for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Apart from the years-long work on that fair, they also spent the 1930s to the early 1950s designing Art Deco pens, cubistic faucets, doorless phone booths, streamlined coal burners, novel steel houses, and countertop kitchen appliances for a variety of American manufacturers. For Alfonso Iannelli, those appliances became “democracy” coming to life. The marketing of Iannelli’s art spread to offices and kitchen counters with his particular design eye. Author David Jameson researched the nearly complete archive of job files, correspondence, and historical writings on industrial design that Iannelli himself kept for sixty years. Everyday Modern: The Industrial Design of Alfonso Iannelli tells each story of the companies and Iannelli’s collaboration with them to produce the remarkable assortment of products, from houses to unexecuted dreams designed for the new American consumer society of the 20th century. Also: Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, the first biography of the influential modernist artist and sculptor includes more than 350 full-color plates. |
|
Notes on the writing of the book... After ten years of writing and over twenty years of research, Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design was published by Top Five Books in the summer of 2013. That autumn, Professor Edwin Walker of Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, asked his former student, Eric O’Malley, to come speak to his class about designing the book. Sitting in on the class were the Director and Assistant Director of the Hieronymus Mueller Museum. The museum deals with the history of Mueller Co., a plumbing products manufacturer, with which Iannelli had several design commissions. They were immediately taken with the “Industrial Design” chapter, which included several Mueller commissions. Coincidentally, Ed Walker was the head of the university’s publishing company, Bronze Man Books. Based on these chance events, a stand-alone book of Iannelli’s industrial designs and a corresponding museum exhibit to accompany the release of this new publication were born. When Eric informed me about the proposed project, it was obvious that what was required was all new text, instead of simply an expansion of the industrial design chapter, previously unpublished images, and new historical information on the various companies from the Iannelli Archives. Victoria Matranga is the Design Programs Coordinator of the International Housewares Association. Since she has done years of research on the history of Chicago’s industrial designers and manufacturers, Vicki was the perfect individual to write the book’s foreword. Tim Samuelson is Chicago’s Cultural Historian and another Iannelli expert. He and I would often share ideas about the subject, and Iannelli’s connections between his appliance design and his talents as a sculptor are the focus of Tim’s preface to this book. Finally, the copy editor of the 2013 book, Jen Barrell, jumped aboard this rapidly moving train to work her editorial magic. Everyday Modern: The Industrial Design of Alfonso Iannelli would not exist without them. |