The Man Who Designed The Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Before Steve Jobs, there was Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes designed everything from the first all-weather stadium, to Manhattan's most exclusive nightclub, to Futurama, the prescient 1939 exhibit that showed how America would look in the near future. The book reveals precisely how central Bel Geddes was to the history of American innovation, design and culture.

Reviews

"Anexceptional profile [of Norman Bel Geddes]... Szerlip's detailedness and thorough research is evident in this supportive yet fair telling of this complex, controversial genius." INNOVATION magazine

A rich, swift, and entrancing new biography...Smart and charming.Boston Review

In this fascinating and minutely researched biography, Szerlip brings the brilliant, indefatigable industrial designer's imagination to life...A remarkable rediscovery of a man ahead of his time. Booklist/ American Library Association (starred review)

Szerlip takes great care to capture the fundamentally theatrical quality of Bel Geddess rise, balancing creative license with considerable research in order to produce a narrative thats fast paced yet rich with detail....A thorough and exciting biography of one of the most imaginative designers of the modern age.Library Journal

Engaging...Szerlip gives full rein to Bel Geddess strengths without brushing aside his paradoxes...[He] exited the stage at the high summer of an American future he had envisioned in fine detail long before we lived it.Chicago Review of Books

Set designer, automobile stylist, architect, founding father of American industrial design, inventor of genius, Norman Bel Geddes was volcanically talented andsui generis. In her lively and scrupulously well-researched biography, B. Alexandra Szerlip gives him a deserved place as a key visionary of modernity.Nikil Saval, author ofCubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

What a riveting storyof a gloriously giddy time when one man could revolutionize the way everything, from Broadway to kitchen scales, looks and works! Is being forgotten one of the ironic penalties of being an American visionary Once you've succeeded in giving the future reality, the present no longer needs you. Thank you, Ms. Szerlip, for the vivacious restoration!John Guare, Playwright,Six Degrees of Separation

I learned a lot aboutNorman Bel Geddes fromB. Alexandra Szerlip's book. He was a complex, controversial genius, worthy of this biography. His visionary design of GM's Futurama exhibit for the 1939 NY World's Fair revolutionized people's thinking about the future.Don Norman, bestselling author of The Design of Everyday Things, and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego

A sympathetic portrait of a guy with such an appetite for creation...Put him on the list with Da Vinci, Verne, Disney and Steve Jobshes somewhere in between all of them.The Last Bookstore Blog

"The Man Who Designed the Futureis a meticulously researched account of Norman Bel Geddes, an ocean-going huckster of genius, until now largely forgotten."THE SPECTATOR

Author Bio

B. ALEXANDRA SZERLIP was a two-time National Endowment for the ArtsWriting Fellow, a Yaddo fellow, and runner-up for London's LothianPrize for a first biography-in-progress. She has contributed toTheParis Review DailyandThe Believer, among other publications, and hasworked in professional theater, as a book editor, sculptor and graphicdesigner. Raised on the East Coast, she lives in San Francisco.