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Catalog illuminates exhibit at Carnegie
Sunday, November 26, 2000 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Where oh Wear-Ever would we be without aluminum?
No hobo grill-packs, no webbed aluminum chairs. No airplanes, no trips to the moon. No walkers for the elderly and disabled. No All-Clad Cookware, for heaven's sake.
If you've ever taken aluminum for granted, now you can take the cure: Reading "Aluminum by Design," a companion to the current Carnegie Museum of Art exhibit, will give you a deeper understanding of and appreciation for aluminum's unique combination of properties -- lightness, malleability and corrosion resistance, among others -- and for the role it played in the development of both life-changing technologies and material culture, i.e., the man-made stuff all around us.
Funded by the Alcoa Foundation with major grants from two other aluminum-fortune foundations and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, "Aluminum by Design" the exhibit explores the history of aluminum as designed object, from cocktail shakers and tennis rackets to storefronts and automobiles. It is a rich visual and intellectual feast, dramatically and creatively staged by Bally Design in cool blues with silvery scrims and aluminum bands that present an in-depth interpretation led by curator Sarah Nichols. Together, Nichols and Bally supply just the right amount of information and showcase objects and text in a compelling and inviting format.
"Aluminum by Design" the catalog is a big, lush book, a landmark in its own right, beautifully designed and bountifully illustrated with photographs of products and often the period advertisements that promoted them. If it seems, at times, like a 296-page marketing tool for Alcoa and all things aluminum, well, you're just living in the pre-Warholian past. You need to buy a clue, and how about a nice set of reproduction 1950s aluminum tumblers to go with it, on sale now in the museum store?
To be fair, while many of the products have an Alcoa connection, other manufacturers are represented, and while that connection runs like a current through the catalog, it is understated in the show itself.
The full title of the exhibit, "Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets," is just right. It communicates the show's inclusive, survey premise, and that it has a point -- to trace aluminum's history in the hands of designers -- that never quite rises to a sharply honed point of view.
There are, to be sure, several underlying themes, which Nichols lays down somewhat obliquely in the catalog's perfunctory introduction, perhaps choosing not to upstage her five contributors, all academics in the fields of history, design and architecture. Nichols tells us where they'll take us: "[A] case study of aluminum provides insight into the broader political and economic currents prevalent at certain historical moments. Aluminum in turn has had profound effects on modern life both embodying and shaping modernity as concept and as lived experience."
Nichols, for example, sees the aluminum-studded draperies and aluminum-leaf ceilings at Clayton as a product of Henry Clay Frick's interest in modern technologies and his friendship with the Mellons, who had made "significant investments" in the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. (they owned about a third).
University of Maryland historian Robert Friedel, in his essay on aluminum in its 19th-century context, first delivers us at the scene of one of the industry's early triumphs -- that "wet, chilly day" in December 1884 when the Washington Monument was capped with a cast-aluminum pyramid just 8.8 inches high. Then he goes back and forward in time, tracking aluminum from its discovery to its earliest applications, a journey that ran through Pittsburgh, where Pittsburgh Reduction Co. (later Alcoa) was founded in 1888. Working in a pilot plant on Smallman Street, the young chemist Charles Martin Hall converted his lab experiments to an industrial process, with the electricity coming from new Westinghouse dynamos. And yet, at the end of the 19th century, aluminum remained a product without a market -- a "solution without a problem."
Dennis Doordan, who teaches at Notre Dame's School of Architecture, identifies the confluence of forces that transformed aluminum from "precious to pervasive" through architecture: an industry eager for new markets, manufacturers' need to improve building products and thereby profits, and the rise of modernism. Henry Hornbostel's aluminum spire of the Smithfield United Church is seen as "a novel demonstration of aluminum's ability to replicate traditional metalwork in a lighter material," but the long-held belief here that it's the world's first structural use of aluminum is neither challenged nor confirmed. The Alcoa Building gets longer play, as does the Aluminaire House, a 1931, architect-designed model home with prefab aluminum components for which Alcoa provided the aluminum. Middle America would never embrace its spare, modern profile, however, ultimately preferring their aluminum in smaller, more traditional doses, as faux-Colonial siding, gutters and downspouts.
Weighing the impact of aluminum on women's lives from 1900 to 1939, Penny Sparke, dean of the Design Faculty at Kingston University, London, finds that it played a significant role in the creation of a consumer culture and of women's dominant role within it. At the turn of the 20th century, as fewer and fewer domestic servants became available, homemakers began taking on more tasks. In 1903, Wear-Ever cookware was introduced by a subsidiary of the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. (i.e., Alcoa), which positioned it as a safe, efficient, labor-saving and modern way for savvy wives and mothers to prepare meals. Women ate it up. But aluminum's heyday in the kitchen (and in the dining room as decorative, functional object) was relatively brief; the metal played a military role in World War II, and after that it was replaced by stainless steel, ovenproof glass and plastic on the domestic front.
Craig Vogel, associate dean of Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts, analyzes the design of new aluminum products from 1950 to the present, to discover why some succeeded and others did not. Colorama tumblers looked good but tipped over and dented easily. Aluminum pop and beer cans, on the other hand, took off after the invention of pull-tabs.
Paola Antonelli, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, examines the role of aluminum in design today and finds that it is valued not only for its technical possibilities but also because it expresses "youth, purity and cleanliness" and an ability "to evoke the new and nostalgic at the same time." She sees aluminum not as a leader in shaping the aesthetics of industrial design, but as "a great character actor," an accent rather than primary material.
A "Highlights" section then throws the spotlight on specific products and events, as well as on influential designers like Russel Wright (for his spun-aluminum serving ware) and Lurelle Guild (for his streamlined Electrolux vacuum).
In Pittsburgh, Alcoa is an exemplary corporate citizen; under Paul O'Neill, it has given the city a smart and spectacular riverfront building and donated its former headquarters to the cause of regional enterprise development. Now it has bought itself a sprawling museum exhibit, and while there was no doubt some soul-searching at 4400 Forbes Ave. before getting into curatorial bed with Alcoa for this show, the museum has constructed a credible and substantial intellectual framework on which to hang it.
Credible, but not critical. There is, for example, no mention of the aluminum siding and awning blight that struck so many 19th-century houses in the 1950s and '60s. Still, like the traveling exhibit, "Aluminum by Design" the book deserves a wide audience, eager to learn more about a pioneering Pittsburgh company and a material that, as Antonelli puts it, "best expresses nostalgia for the future."
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