including the main hall and the state room, for the Panama Railways
Steamship Company’s liner, the ssPanama. His spaces exuded an air
of modern luxury and recalled the interiors shown in contemporary
Hollywood films and glamorous hotels more closely than they did the
usual standardized spaces of mass travel. A range of modern materials
was employed including stainless steel, aluminium and glass, and Loewy
rounded off the corners of the objects in the interior both for safety
reasons and as a strategy for making those compact spaces look as large
as possible.
Many of the same requirements underpinned the industrial
designers’ work for train interiors. Henry Dreyfuss’s settings for the 20 th
Century Limited were strikingly controlled, modern-looking, and decep-
tively spacious. His use of concealed lighting enhanced the luxurious
ambiance that he had set out to create. Muted colours – blue, grey and
brown – were combined with new materials, including cork and Formica.
‘Fully enclosed by glass and rounded surfaces, protected from weather
and engine-soot by air-conditioning, and lulled by radio music, they
[the passengers] could forget they were travelling as they experienced a
rubber-cushioned ride.’^22 In the train’s main lounge and observation
car, the designer’s use of top lighting and the addition of metal strips to
the columns combined with a number of other features to create an
extremely elegant travelling environment. Loewy’s interior designs for
the Broadway Limited provided a similarly comfortable experience for its
passengers. The train’s luxurious interior was enhanced by the presence
of a circular bar as glamorous as anything that could have been found in
a New York or a Parisian nightclub.
In spite of their significant impact on interior spaces in the com-
mercial sphere the industrial designers made very little difference to the
design of the modern home. Exceptionally Bel Geddes was involved in a
project to visualize ‘The House of Tomorrow’. The result was spatially
unadventurous however, most of its rooms being conventional rectan-
gles, and its design details echoed those of the European Modernists for
the most part. The design was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal,
thereby reaching a much wider audience than its European equivalents,
however. Another group of American designers, several of who had
European roots and architectural backgrounds, focused exclusively upon
furniture and interior design. They were more successful than the indus-
trial designers in modernizing the American home at that time. Gilbert164 Rhode, Paul Frankl, Kem Weber, Russel Wright and a few others worked