In 1936 the critics Sheldon and Martha Cheney, in their influential survey Art and the Machine, singled out the Los Angeles-based artist Kem Weber (1889-1963) as the first West Coast designer to bring a tradition-free, machine-age creativeness to American interior design. Their comments reflected changes in American design that had coalesced after 1930. Gone were the decorative geometrical excesses of the Jazz Age decade of the 1920s, termed Art Deco or Zigzag Moderne by later scholars. The new goal was a sober, rational design that sought to create a machine aesthetic symbolizing the standardization and mass production that, it was hoped, would improve life during the Great Depression. For the Cheneys the machine aesthetic of the 1930s was embodied in a new hero: the industrial designer, an artist committed to using the creative potential of science and engineering to improve the design of manufactured consumer goods including household furnishings.

Kem Weber’s turn-of-the-century European training in the traditional craft of furniture making as well as his solid grounding in the principles of the Modern Movement made him uniquely qualified to serve as one of these new industrial designers. Born in Berlin in 1889, Karl Emanuel Martin (later abbreviated by him in the United States to Kem) Weber entered the workshop of the royal cabinet maker Eduard Schulz in Potsdam in 1904, where he learned the craft of furniture design and production. After graduating in 1907 as a cabinetmaker, Weber entered the Royal Academy of Applied Arts in Berlin as a student of the architect and designer Bruno Paul (1874-1968). Paul was a founding member of the short-lived but highly influential Deutsche Werkbund, which advocated the development of high-quality, artist-designed industrial and consumer goods as a means of increasing Germany’s sales abroad. Arriving in San Francisco in 1914, Weber was stranded in the United States by the outbreak of World War I.

Image Credits:
View of Main Stairwell from Second Floor Landing, W. E. Bixby, Sr., Residence
Photograph by R. B. Churchill, 1937.