In 1918 Weber moved to Santa Barbara, where he set up a design studio in the historic Covarrubias adobe and taught art classes at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, founded in 1920 by the painter Fernand Lungren. In 1921 Weber moved to Los Angeles, where he became art director for the innovative furniture store Barker Brothers. A trip to Europe in 1925—the first since 1914—took Weber to Paris, where he was exposed to French modern design developments ranging from the luxurious decorative furnishings of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann to the austere, machine-oriented purism of Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Weber returned to Los Angeles inspired by these Parisian developments and committed to bringing modern furniture design to Southern California. Working with Barker Brothers, he launched the Modes and Manners shop within the store in 1926 selling handmade and commercially manufactured furnishings and goods inspired by Parisian decorative trends as well as American Jazz Age forms including skyscrapers.
Weber’s awareness of the potential that machines and mass production held for the improvement of life through design went back to his student days in Berlin with Bruno Paul. By 1934 commissions to design tubular, chrome-plated steel furniture for the Lloyd Manufacturing Company in Menominee, Michigan and clocks for Lawson Time, Incorporated in Pasadena, along with work on his self-assembled wooden Airline chair, gave Weber the opportunity of putting into practice his belief that machine-produced objects required new forms. Through these designs, Weber transformed himself into an industrial designer creating streamlined mass-produced objects. These streamlined new designs embodied the look by which Weber’s contemporaries like Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes sought to enhance the appearance of their products during the 1930s. Based on scientific principles of airflow and hydraulics, streamlining emphasized rounded corners and horizontality as opposed to the orthogonal verticals of earlier Zigzag Moderne designs.
By the mid-1930s Streamline Moderne had become a marketing catchphrase of popular design in the United States. Developed originally to increase the speed of automobiles, airplanes, and trains, streamlining principles informed the appearance of household and work-related consumer goods ranging from electric irons to refrigerators and telephones. Their rounded corners and restyled outer envelopes concealed the new electrical equipment driving these products, and were deliberately designed to humanize the look of machinery for the average consumer. Streamlining also invaded commercial and civic architecture, embodied for most Americans today in the drive-in market and roadside diner. It was less frequently used in residential design—other than kitchens and bathrooms—with most Americans preferring the traditional Colonial Revival house to the Moderne residence. Employing new materials like aluminum, chrome, rubber and plastics, the Streamline Moderne optimistically embraced the potential of technology to create a total design approach, envisioning a future where technology would produce a flourishing economy that in turn would foster a cohesive society, a hope some have seen as uniquely American.
Image Credits:
Top Left: Kem Weber. Dressing Table for Barker Brothers, Inc., c.1926-1928
watercolor, crayon, graphite and silver paint on paper.
MIddle Right: Kem Weber. Steel Tubular Furniture for Lloyd Manufacturing Company, 1934
watercolor, silver tape, and graphite on board.
Bottom Left: Kem Weber. Electric Clock for Lawson Time, Inc., 1934
watercolor, silver tape and graphite on board.
Note: Select thumbnail for larger image.
