Eugenic Design

Christina Cogdell is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches art, design, and cultural history.

• 1. Introduction: Controlling evolution2. Products or bodies? Streamline design and eugenics as applied biology3. Progenitors of the future: Popularizing streamlining and eugenics during the 1930s4. "Flow is the word": Biological efficiency and streamline design5. Race hygiene, product hygiene: Curing disease through sterilization6. Future perfect? The elusive "ideal type"7. Conclusion: Pseudoscience? Pseudostyle?

"This is history that is relevant."-Design Issues"Engaging, thoughtfully researched, and well written."-Journal of Social History"Cogdell does much to advance our understanding of an anomalous 1930s aesthetic that has befuddled several generations of the best design historians. Her thesis is provocative, her writing is well paced, and her argument is convincing."-Journal of American History"An ambitious attempt to link the professionalization of industrial design with the popular eugenics movement of the 1930s. . . . A bold and truly original thesis."-Technology and Culture"This highly original, well written, carefully crafted, and vigorously argued volume is a notable addition to American intellectual and cultural history."-Enterprise and Society"A significant contribution to the field of cultural history broadly defined. Cogdell's argument is compelling, and the evidence makes a strong case for linking an important modernist artistic movement with an important-and nefarious-scientific doctrine. This book will be widely read and discussed."-Robert W. Rydell, author of World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions"Christina Cogdell provocatively locates the ideology of streamlining in the popular eugenics movement of the 1930s. Tracing complex connections between personal philosophies of industrial designers and the visual rhetoric of their public design work, her cultural reading of design situates it dramatically at the intersection of science, technology, and popular culture. This book could well revolutionize the field of design history."-Jeffrey Meikle, author of Twentieth-Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939