Shannan Clark, Columbia University
"Making Progressive Designers: The Design Laboratory, 1935-1940"

As the country's first comprehensive school dedicated to modern design education, the Design Laboratory in New York City embodied the ideological tensions within the new field. Reflecting the radical milieu of the 1930s, the Design Laboratory was an important point of contact between
the business culture of the leading commercial designers, the experimental modernism of the Depression-Era avant-garde, an unprecedented federal arts bureaucracy, and the militant trade unionism of the left wing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Founded in 1935 under the auspices of the Federal Art Project if the Works Progress Administration, the school sought to provide a holistic design education that stressed experimentation and proficiency in a wide range of media and techniques. Following the withdrawal of federal support in the summer of 1937, the school continued operation on a cooperative basis under the supervision of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT), a left-wing CIO union engaged in organizing the emerging "new class" of professionals who performed alienated mental labor within complex modern institutions. The new arrangement allowed the faculty and students of the school greater freedom in their attempts to develop a modernist aesthetic in keeping with their social democratic values, but financial difficulties plagued the Laboratory. When the school finally dissolved in 1940, its instructors and pupils scattered across America, taking their experiences at the Design Laboratory to their later work in teaching and design. The Design Laboratory illuminates the conflicting cultural currents of the 1930s, offering insight not just into the development of the industrial design profession, but also into the possibilities and limitations of efforts to create a social democratic culture in the twentieth-century United States.

<<back