East and West: USA

Successful designers such as Raymond Loewy or Walter Dorwin Teague propagated streamline design – as of the 1930s such streamlining was brought to bear by applying a dynamic shape on trains, cars, buses, not to mention on radios, toasters and cameras. It was a new, consumer-oriented take on design in line with Loewy’s maxim that “Never leave well enough alone”.

This very commercial approach to design was criticized for being mere ‘drapery’ or ‘styling’. The opposite movement went by the name of organic design, which not only pursued functionalist and ethical aspects such as ergonomics and cost-benefit ratios but also had a social thrust. “The best for the most for the least” – was the motto of Ray and Charles Eames, and insisted that sound, consistent and well-designed products should be accessible to the broad American public in the post-war era.

Starting in architecture, in the 1960s postmodernism emerged, with ironic and provocative answers to the predominant creed of functionalism, which it sought to overcome.

Typical of American society is people’s mobility, something that expanded in the 1980s to include things at the digital level: The PC became the most important tool of the service society – and an equally indispensable part of private households.

The display for the presentation of USA was designed by the artist Tilo Schulz (born 1972 in Leipzig).