Fancy Kitchen in Canada
A report on 20th century industrial design for domestic appliances
(Refrigerators, Toasters, Kettles and Coffee Makers)
Scope of Work
This is a commissioned research primarily intended to support collection development of domestic appliances at Canada Science and TechnologyMuseum. Industrial Designis an important interpretative approach applied to this collection and currently not covered by historical assessments.
With regards to industrial design, this studybriefly discusses its pertinent links to technology, material and visual culture, gender and class issues in the 20th century. It contains a timelinewhich names important events which (may) have influenced the history of industrial design in Canada. It lists major trends and turning points in the design of kitchen appliances such as: refrigerators, toasters, kettles, and coffee makers, along with identifying possible items for further acquisition.As well, the study recordssome resources relevant to curatorial research which refer to industrial design of domestic kitchen appliances in Canada. It offers a selected bibliography of books, articles, popular magazines, trade literature, websites, and a collection of data on Canadian industrial designers and/or companies for which they designed products. This paper also identifies further needed research, besides stressing the importance of adding to the data enclosed herewith.
I would like to acknowledge the help provided by subscribers of H-Canada listserv who commented on the topic, offered pertinent information relating to the location of archives, collections and supplementary sources, and made recommendations of additional literature and further avenues of research.
Methodology
The industrial design of kitchen appliances in Canada has rarely been addressed in peer review literature. This study provides a short literature review of books and articles which touch on the subject of industrial design, while its main methodology relies on an examination of period advertisements for domestic appliances, available in trade literature[1] or in edited volumes such as Jim Heinmann’s All-American Ads (see the various decades in bibliography). During the 20th century, printed advertisements boosted consumerism in North America by combining the up-to-date-ness of technology with the visual appeal of object design. Modifications in advertising concepts were in part due to the advancement in printing technology (from introducing color as modern feature – “cult of the new”, to juxtaposing lettering to hand-drawings, to computer-generated images etc.) and in part to a complex transformation of the class-based society into a rather classless one. In North America, this commercial approachstarted in strong relation to Victorian aesthetics (where keeping appearances was a virtue) and gradually turned the ‘visual’ into the only reality that is (in the line of “what you see is what you get”).
This methodology also allows to more accurately date artefacts in the CSTM collection whose dates are either unclear or missing, since the objects are easily identifiable by their look (shape, dimensions, material, and sometimes colour) in period advertisements from the trade literature.
Literature review
A number of publications explore housework and kitchen appliances in North America; most of these pertain to the U.S. and give references of various degrees on social history, gender, technologies and design.
Susan Strasser (1982) provides an excellent account on American household technology and the ideas about housework which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is heavily illustrated with period photos which give a good visual description of household chores and the technologies women have used, as well as period advertisements, images of stores, manufacturing plants, cartoons etc.
Around the same time, Ruth Cowan-Swartz wrote her classic book More Work for Mother (1983) which discusses the “ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave” in the context of industrialization in America. More recently, Elizabeth Collins Cromley (2010) investigates the “food axis” as a partnership between spaces in a house which are involved in the production, storage and consumption of food. Cromley’s is an architectural social history of American houses, but many of the concepts she explains may be used in conjunction with Peter Ward’s History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (1999) to figure out a “food axis” for the Canadian houses (no such research has yet been undertaken).
Popular magazines have been very influential during the twentieth century in creating a consumers’ market, especially by means of their articles and by publishing advertising targeting a specific readership, namely a growing middle class. Valerie Korinek’s extensive study of Chatelainemagazine in the 1950s and 1960s explains that Canadian women were generally more critical then their American counterparts with regards to issues relating both to the household and the world outside the home, even if most of them were, like in America, housewives. Canadians made informed choices and, in accordance to Parr’s viewpoint, bought goods in moderation as they were mainly opposed to the idea of credit purchasing (this extended from small appliances to house purchase). Kitchen appliances were featured massively in postwar ads as dream-objects desired by brides or housewives to make their life easier and happier. Similar advertisementsmay be found in the pages of other popular magazines such as Maclean’s, Canadian Homes (& Gardens) and Canadian Home Journal – no other comprehensive study of any of those magazines has yet been written.
Joy Parr (1999) offers an excellent account on Canadian domestic goods, albeit only for the postwar years: she discusses the vision of modern domesticity which emerged immediately after the Second World War and how the modern “international” style influenced the search for a national one in a cultural-economic context when Canada tried to detach itself from British domination while becoming more and more attuned to American products. Parr asserts that “in the postwar period, household goods were shaped by political processes and ethical judgements as much as by entrepreneurial imperatives and technological opportunities”. Part 2 focus on Design is of special interest for the present study, as well as the last sub-chapter “A caution of excess” of part 3.
Lerner and Williamson (1991) provide a good survey on existing literature; volume 2 of their work is the index, which has many entries on advertising (see page 36). As the Fine Arts Bibliographer in the York University Libraries, Williamson had collected trade cards and the annuals of the Art Directors Club of Toronto (1949-1970s), as well as international cards which often included Canadian references.[2]
For the emerging role of industrial designers as mediators in the context of a developing consumer culture, see Penny Sparke (1998) and Jeffrey Meikle’s book Twentieth Century Limited (1979), though he does not discuss gender of class relationships in the tug-of-war between male designers (usually part of an elite) and female consumers (of all classes). Rachel Gotlieb and Cora Golden offer an overall look at Design in Canada (2004) in the second half of the twentieth century. They explain how Canadian designers used new materials such as aluminium and plastics – along with new technologies to shape these materials into different forms – to foster modernistic principles in the first postwar decades. Government grants and awards from organizations such as the National Industrial Design Council promoted products ranging from furniture to electronics to household appliances. The 1960s space-age and the pop culture of the 1970s, coupled with an increasingly globally-oriented market rebelled against modernist rigidity and brought pluralism into the picture. Gotlieb and Golden dedicate an essay to small appliances, which has illustrations and basic information on a variety of kettles and coffee makers, helpful in the process of future acquisitions for the CSTM collection.
Shelley Nickels’ article in Technology and Culture (Oct 2002) is a detailed account on the early days of refrigerator design in America. She argues that industrial design was central to manufacturers’ struggles to redefine the refrigerator from an expensive luxury item for the wealthy few to an affordable, laborsaving, food preservation device for a broad market of ‘servantless housewives’. The economical, technological and aesthetic factors which influenced refrigerators’ designwere the first steps towards creating the homogeneous (‘average’) vision of the ‘modern streamlined kitchen’ as an icon of progress in the making of a middle-class society (which had started in the 1930s and peaked in the 1950s). Considering that Canadians imported and used American refrigerators, this article is most relevant for this present study. No such studies exist for small appliances, but Nickles’ argument may serve as a base for further investigations.
Please refer to the bibliography section of this report for additional sources.
Industrial design of domestic appliances
There are a few themes which generally pertain to industrial design of domestic appliances in Canada and which help situate it in the national, North American and international contexts. These themes are found at the intersection of Canadian history, history of household technology and food production/consumption, considerations of gender and class (bordered by mentions of different period life-styles), modernism and reactions to modernism, as well as the advertising industry and consumerism. Specific references may then be maderespectively in the study of big appliancesand small appliances, particularly when it comes to relations which can be drawn between appliance design and other relevant industries: for instance, refrigerators should be discussed in relation to the automobile industry, since the two products share similar technologies,[3] while small appliances invite accounts of war-deriving technologies and/or ideologies (Second World War and Cold War). This study touches chronologically on some of these aspects.
The twentieth century saw big economic and social transformations in Canada. A former dominion of the United Kingdom, coupled with a big area of French-based culture (Quebec), and facing a growing influence of continuously flowing immigrantcommunities from countries world-wide, Canadahas struggled to define its national identity for the past century.Juxtaposed on the intersection of British, French and various other immigrant-culture values was Canadians’ growing attachment to American economic values, defined as they were by a politics of standardization[4] which influenced (and was in turn manipulated by) social levelling. When comparing the US and Canada, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show a few decades delay between the latter and former with regard to technological developments and change in social-economic structures, a gap which has gradually shrunk towards the beginning of the twenty-first century. A separate survey of US companies (producers and distributors of electrical appliances) operating in Canada in the 19th, 20th and 21st century, along with a survey of Canadian-based similar companies would help determine important milestones and influences in design.
Studies which relateCanadian national identity toCanadian design are yet to be written. An interesting case which commands attention is that surrounding the “Buy Canadian” crusade launched in 1958 bythe Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, which dispensedmaple leaf tags to Canadian companies and staged displays at Eaton’s and other major retailers. Given this campaign happened seven years earlier than the adoption of Canada’s national flag (the Maple Leaf flag), and keeping in mind the related fierce national debate spanning a few issues of the Maclean’s magazine,[5] a legitimate question emerges: how influential was this campaign – as a market-driven endeavour – on the adoption of the maple leaf as the essential Canadian symbol?
Changes in the design of domestic appliances are strongly correlated with changes in life-styles throughout the twentieth century. As electricity became readily available, appliances which used electricity lent an increasinglybig hand in domestic affairs such as food preparation, food storage, cleaning, washing etc. In the case of wealthier people, they replaced servants; in households of lower financial means, they became the helper which housewives had never had. Little wonder then that appliances were advertised as “electric servants” which allowed the gradual elimination of ‘washing’ or ‘baking’ days (washing machines and stoves) and saved hours of daily shopping (refrigerators kept food fresh for longer periods). Given their size and correlated prices, smaller appliances were more affordable in the beginning (1920s), yet refrigerators quickly caught up in the 1930s.[6]In the postwar period, although this ‘liberation’ from household duties came in contrast to a strongly advertised middle-class housewife figure, it nevertheless progressivelypermitted women to enter the work-force and become working-women (who have still juggled home and work hours to this day). The aspect of these material ‘servants’ was progressively transformed from primarily functional apparatus to visually appealing objects with which users could establish personal relationships. The appliances studied for this report had users of both genders and were not primarily used by women in the household/kitchen (like stoves or washing machines, for example). In the postwar period, refrigerators start being advertised as a ‘family’ of products for the ‘family’ of users: again, this hinted at relationships between objects and humans in the postwar North American material culture.[7]
Entertaining and leisure are important aspects which underlined middle-class culture in North America and which also influenced product design, spanning most decades of the twentieth century. An example from 1927 declares: “Entertaining becomes a pleasure with the dependable assistance of Frigidaire. Unexpected callers or long-planned-for guests are alike served the perfect foods that come from this treasure chest of the modern kitchen.”[8] Thirty years later, a brochure for the Leonard Refrigerator juxtaposes images of the fridge and of leisure and vacationing.[9]
Electric appliances transformed cooking, (food) storage, the kitchen space and, by extension, the home. Elaborate brochures from the 1920s includepresentations of refrigerator models, along with advice on caring for the appliance, and recipes for dishes to be included in a variety of meals; interestingly, the images accompanying these types of meals show a high formality and speak of a ‘middle-class’ life-style closer to the higher end of the class spectrum.[10] Such images introduced a ‘desired’ life-style to people in lower classes ad they became part of advertisements luring consumers into buying appliances with the promise that they too will be able to entertain in high style. New recipes appeared, adapted to the new technologies.[11]As American industrialization and urbanization transformed food into a commodity, pre-war mass-production and mass-distribution of packaged food expanded in the postwar fully prepared / frozen mealsand fast-food restaurants.[12] Traditional pantries and food storage space at the back of the kitchen gradually disappeared[13] and in the postwar period the modern open-concept plan was widely adopted in North America (simultaneously in the US and Canada):[14] industrial designers responded by giving appliances an increasing visual appeal, since such objects were not only on constant display for family members and guests alike but, like houses, they were also directly connected to a ‘pride of ownership’ in the middle-class culture.
It is important to note the association between product design and product name in creating the ‘image’ of the product. For refrigerators, names such as De Luxe, Tudor, Royal, Cadillac, or New Yorker express a ‘high-class style’ which is inherently attractive and, along with a competitive price, becomes affordable to lower classes.In addition, the socialistic ethos of modernism paradoxically helped with the product ‘image’ construction since designers embraced new technologies and materials as the key to modernism. In the early postwar period, they renounced the imitative styles of the 1940s, when radios could look like pyramids or toasters,and adopted an opposite approach: “for the new materials to seem modern, the thinking of the day was that they had to avoid imitation.”[15] This is not completely surprising since modernism has trumpeted the breaking with tradition and a constant renewal of “forms [which] followed function.”
The war had a great say in this change. Before the Second World War, appliances were made of materials such as steel, white enamel and even aluminium, which were advertised primarily in relation to health-benefits (“super-health aluminium guarantee better health”). Although aluminium, plastic and moulded plywood had been invented before the war, significant technical advances developed for a variety of military uses made them seem new and revolutionary.[16]With regards to the appliances industry, aluminium and plastic (polymers) were light, strong and malleable materials which made them ideal for mass production. Lightweight aluminiumcould be processed in a multitude of ways and the techniques used influenced the look of the design.[17]Conversely, polypropylene (a new type of plastic developed in the postwar period) was more heat resistant and permitted brighter colours, which determined changes in design, especially for small appliances.