Norman Bel Geddes and his Philosophy of Lights
The man whose work shaped iconic American 20th-century design, including lighting design, left a dramatic legacy in the arts and architecture. From his origins in the theatrical industry to his automotive, furniture and other utilitarian designs, Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was a vital force.
Born in Michigan, educated in Cleveland and Chicago–creating one of his signature designs, the weight scale, for a manufacturer in Toledo, Ohio–Bel Geddes was raised in Pittsburgh, where he grew up poor while working as a bellboy and in his grandfather’s grocery store. Bel Geddes’s lighting designs and techniques—which are inseparable—are among his “most impressive contributions to stagecraft and American theater in the early 20th century,” according to University of Minnesota theater arts scholar Jorge Bogusz. Designing Modern America (Yale University Press, 2005) author Christopher Innes reports that Max Reinhardt, searching for a designer to mount his production of The Miracle in New York City, met Bel Geddes and granted his first major commission, which made Norman Bel Geddes a top Broadway talent overnight.
Table of Contents:
- Bel Geddes on the role of lighting in theater
- Who is Norman Bel Geddes?
- The evolution of modern stage lighting
Bel Geddes on the role of lighting in theater
In his autobiography, Bel Geddes enthused about his philosophy of creating mood, drama and intrigue with light:
“Good lighting adds space, depth, mood, mystery, parody, contrast, change of emotion, intimacy, [and] fear easier than by any other method. From a technical standpoint, stage lighting has only started. The principles we are working with today will last a long, long time because they are founded upon simplicity and directness. The important consideration is the placing and focusing of lamps, with its five main considerations: source, candle power, angle of projection, area of direct illumination, and color.”
Bel Geddes goes on:
“Accentuation is one of the chief values of lighting. Forms, actors, and even a specific speech of an actor, can be given emphasis and contrasted. Color must be considered in relation to the illuminant and its receiving surface. One of the values of colored light is in making last-minute corrections when it is too late to repaint a piece of scenery or redo a costume. Highly expert handling is required for mobile effects. They should not be attempted by the obvious means of having the lamps moved. They should, instead, be achieved by a series of lamps that follow the path of the performer on the stage. Movement in light can add enormously to a dramatic situation, primarily because it is felt rather than seen. Lighting can produce a semi-hypnotic influence over an audience that cannot be equaled even by sound.”
Theatrical editor Bogusz argues that lighting is crucial to the Bel Geddes approach to unity of theatrical production: “None of his designs for sculptured settings, such as those for The Divine Comedy, Jeanne d’Arc, Arabesque, Lazarus Laughed, Hamlet, Lysistrata, Iphigenia…or his more famous and more realistic designs for The Miracle and Dead End, would have been as effective without the modifying power of dynamic lighting.” His daughter, Barbara Bel Geddes, later became an actress on Broadway and in motion pictures and television.
Bel Geddes’s lighted stage productions, some of which Bogusz notes were grandiose and well-publicized (some were never actually produced), are born of his plans, sketches, renderings, models, programs, prompts, scripts, notes and reviews. “Of particular interest to the student of lighting are the visual artifacts; the renderings, sketches, plans, and the less frequent photographs,” Bogusz wrote. Lectures by Bel Geddes show certain details, procedures and development of his lighting design philosophy. Two years after his death, Bel Geddes’s autobiography, Miracle in the Evening, went to press.
In it, he details the progression of his thoughts on using lights. Bel Geddes claimed to have been expelled from schools for drawing satirical cartoons of teachers. He left the Cleveland Institute of Art to indulge his fascination with American Indians by living for a summer on the U.S. government’s Blackfoot reservation. This led Bel Geddes to write Thunderbird, an opera based on Indian myths. Subsequently, he irritated staff at the Chicago Art Institute by insisting on drawing anatomy in the dissecting room of the Cook County morgue instead of in an art studio. Bel Geddes ditched art classes to act as an extra on stage at the Chicago Opera, “which he found completely intoxicating,” supporting himself by doing lettering for fashion plates in the Sears Roebuck catalog. Unable to pay his bills, Bel Geddes dropped out of Chicago’s Art Institute to take a minimum-wage job in Detroit with an engraving company, where he drew advertising posters for Collier’s magazine, eventually gaining work as a contracted designer with exclusive rights to creating a glass dance floor for the Century Roof Theatre—with what he described as “my new system of lighting for the apron and stage, and the scenery for the opening production.”
Bel Geddes later designed the Coquette lamp, captioning the light as “irresistibly chic and saucy, this little lamp is as practical in use as it is diverting in design. The eyes are really clips to hold the hat shade to the frosted glass globe.”
Who is Norman Bel Geddes?
According to the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the forerunner for which Bel Geddes co-founded with 14 others in 1944, Norman Melancton Geddes began work as an advertising draftsman in Chicago and Detroit in 1913. “After his 1916 marriage to writer Helen Belle Sneider of Toledo, they changed their surnames to Bel-Geddes.” He created movie sets for Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood in 1925 and, at the suggestion of Ray Graham of Graham-Paige Motors Company, Bel Geddes designed five brass concept models for him, each representing progressive future car designs for 1928 through 1932, though none were built.
The Simmons Company commissioned him to design metal bedroom furniture in 1928 (the pieces went on sale in 1932) and a model of his House of Tomorrow was published in Ladies Home Journal in 1931, becoming a catalyst for architectural streamlining. “Bel Geddes continued to design and patent not only incredibly innovative futuristic streamlined cars, trains, ocean liners and planes but practical consumer products as well,” IDSA’s website reports. Many of these were depicted in his 1932 book, Horizons, illustrated by his employee, Stowe Myers. The book fanned his reputation as a flamboyant industrial designer. Bel Geddes’s Art Deco-like motif inspired transportation wonders, such as Union Pacific’s M-10,000 and the M-130 Pan American China Clippers (both in 1934), with Bel Geddes designing interiors for Pan Am’s Clippers.
Horizons features Bel Geddes’s designs of the Oriole stove for the Standard Gas Equipment Company of Baltimore, which debuted in 1936, establishing an architectural standard for future cook stoves. In 1937, he designed a model City of Tomorrow with expressways featured in an advertisement for the Shell Oil Company on assignment by the J. Walter Thompson Agency. This concept was expanded to become the Futurama exhibit for General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, which IDSA describes as “probably the most popular exhibit there.”
“It showed a panorama of superhighways and teardrop-shaped cars of the future year 1960. Using these materials, he published a book, Magic Motorways [Bel Geddes coined the term motorway] in 1940, which became an inspiration for postwar freeway and interstate highway systems.” Bel Geddes was also contracted to create a typewriter, which eventually became IBM’s Model A electric typewriter, debuting in 1948.
The evolution of modern stage lighting
Throughout his career, lighting fascinated Bel Geddes, particularly as an essential part of the process for ongoing ritualization, experimentation and innovation. As Bel Geddes, who also designed the rectangular iris or square focus lamp—a spotlight—for the Century Lighting Company, observed in his autobiography:
“I was now mostly occupied with models of the [stage opera] Thunderbird scenery, and with extensive lighting experiments. For it was now becoming increasingly apparent that some scenes would be greatly enhanced if the lighting could be concentrated in single beams rather than being dispersed or used flat. In those days all special atmospheric effects, even shadows, were painted on the scenery. The projection of a beam of light to cast a shadow was unheard of. There were only footlights, borderlights suspended over the stage, and bunch lights from the sides. The bulbs were regular 30-watt size which spread their light evenly, and the result was flat illumination without any luminous quality. I wondered why something wasn’t done about this, and determined to equip my model stage with a lighting system and to research the problem.
“The electrician in my office building gave me a brief instruction in the whys and wherefores of wiring, and I set about constructing a theater switchboard in miniature. By trial and error, rebuilding over and over, I had my one-by-two-foot stage wired within two months. Power was from dry cell batteries. The approximation of a spotlight was a cardboard tube three inches long by three quarters of an inch in diameter, with bulb and reflector from a cheap flashlight.
“Each of the ten proscenium slots on either side of the stage were equipped with two of these lamps. Something of an innovation, perhaps, but merely putting into general use the spot lamps of musical comedy. More experimenting made it clear that the first row of overhead lamps should be in front of the proscenium instead of behind it overhead lamps located at a 45-degree angle in front of the curtain line produced modeling in facial features, and life to the eyes, which neither border nor footlights could achieve. They were equally favorable for the figures and clothing of the players and, owing to the concentrated beam, did not strike scenery. I felt sure that in a theater auditorium, hung from the ceiling, the gallery railing, or the balcony balustrade, they could be concealed from the vision of the audience and would prove as effective as they were in my model.”
The Norman Bel Geddes legacy extends far beyond dramatic effect in lighting or design, however. Later in life, when America’s largest traveling circuses combined, forming the legendary Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, they attempted to revive the circus by developing a new, contemporary image—with the help of Norman Bel Geddes.
The results? The big top, the parade, all the costumes, some of the acts, as well as the animal cages, and even the mechanics of transporting the Greatest Show on Earth by rail—all these iconic commercial artifacts were designed by Norman Bel Geddes.
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum notes that “[a]s one of America’s most prolific and influential industrial designers, Norman Bel Geddes helped create the [s]treamlined style that defined American design throughout the 1930s and early 40s. In addition to cars, trains, and other industrial designs, Bel Geddes…created a number of memorable exhibitions for world’s fairs, including the 1934 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago and the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Through these large exhibitions, Bel Geddes sought to promote both American technology and culture, thereby helping to bolster national pride during the difficult years of the Great Depression. His Patriot radio design of 1939 likewise features technology, in this case, a radio encased within the unabashedly patriotic stars-and-stripes motif of its case, to create an optimistic and useful emblem of American technology, industry, and identity.”
Designated “the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century” by America’s leading mid-century newspaper, the New York Times, Norman Bel Geddes is perhaps the most renowned American designer in history. As the Museum of the City of New York puts it, Bel Geddes sought “nothing less the transformation of American society through design.” Christopher Innes argues in Designing Modern America that Bel Geddes “touched every aspect of people’s existence…from fashion, fabrics and costume jewelry to shopping centers and office buildings”—“in particular, the most obvious symbols of modern life: cars, houses and hotels, kitchens, and household furnishings.”
“Even more uncompromisingly modernistic in his vision,” Innes contends, “Norman Bel Geddes took up where [designer Joseph] Urban left off, almost single-handedly creating the entire style of streamlining that became so characteristic of modernistic American design.”
For his part, Norman Bel Geddes, who once flirted with socialism and leftist political philosophy, nevertheless took an undeniable pride in his own inventive individualism. Describing a certain lighting effect in detail in his Miracle in the Evening, he wrote before he died that he built “the lamps for a lighting demonstration that amazed [a client].”
“The proscenium curtain and borders were raised to a height of twenty feet,” he wrote. “The stage was nearly dark. In the center was a life-sized marble statue of [the Greek goddess] Diana. … I sat in the middle of the Little Theatre auditorium. We first showed the statue under various standard lightings. Then [someone] put out all of the lights for a moment and allowed our eyes to get used to the darkness. Then [the client] began seeing something he had never seen on the stage before. The head of the statue began to glow. Gradually it grew brighter and brighter. No previous equipment could have achieved this intensity of candle power in a small concentrated area. [The client] was impressed. He walked forward, looking for the light source. It wasn’t until he returned to his seat that he saw the lamp on the left balcony rail. ‘What kind of lamp is that?’ he asked.”
The reader can almost sense Norman Bel Geddes beaming his answer, which was a lighting source he claimed to invent: “A thousand-watt flood[light] with a lens and [a] reflector.”
Selective chronology
1916
- Norman Bel Geddes introduced focus (spot) lamps as sole means of lighting a stage, placing them above the stage in the place of rows of bulbs in troughs. The footlights were replaced with lights recessed in auditorium walls and ceiling.
1924
- Designed Island Dance theatre and restaurant for Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood.
- Designed Harvard University Theatre for Prof. G. Baker in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Designed the square (rectangular iris) focus lamp for the Century Lighting Company.
- Invented an electric horse race game.
1929
- Appointed Designer of Illumination for all buildings and grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair.
- Appointed consultant to the Architectural Commission of the Chicago World’s Fair.
1940
- Designed typography for rotogravure sections of newspapers for the International Paper Company.
- Designed prefabricated house of 36 units for the Housing Corporation of America.
- Designed radios for the Emerson Radio and Phonograph Corporation.
- Designed oil cloth and wall coverings for the Columbus Coated Fabrics Corporation.
- Designed a refrigerator for the Kelvinator Corporation.
- Designed interior of the La Rue Restaurant, including the bar, foyer, retiring rooms, dance floor, orchestra stage and lighting.
- Redesigned stage of Rockefeller Center Theatre for ice skating.
- Designed costumes and scenery for It Happens on Ice, for Sonja Henie.
- Designed trademark for Heald Manufacturing Company.
- Designed motorcars for Nash Motor Company.
- Author of a book entitled Magic Motorways, published by Random House.
—From Miracle in the Evening by Norman Bel Geddes
Sources: Museum of the City of New York; Norman Bel Geddes’s autobiography, Miracle in the Evening; Metropolitan Museum of New York; University of Minnesota theater arts scholar Jorge Bogusz; Designing Modern America (Yale University Press, 2005) author Christopher Innes.
Editor’s note: this article is part of the Legends series on great minds in lighting, industrial design and architecture. Can you think of a person who merits scrutiny in the history of lighting? Tell us why—include the individual’s name and your reasons—he or she ought to be considered a legend in the Language of Lighting.
