by Judith Dressel
Vice President Edsel & Eleanor Ford HouseThe Edsel & Eleanor Ford House is pleased to participate in this year's Detroit Area Art Deco Society's Modernism Exposition with a display in the DAADS booth of furnishings designed for the house by Walter Dorwin Teague and commissioned by Edsel Ford in 1935. Incongruous as the furnishings may seem in the Fords' Cotswold-style country house in Grosse Pointe Shores, these four rooms testify to Edsel and Eleanor Ford's interest in and cultivation of the moderne throughout their lives.
In his career as president of Ford Motor Company from 1918 at the age of 25, until his death in 1943, Edsel Ford influenced, encouraged, cultivated, shaped and produced modern design. Throughout the 1930s, Edsel Ford retained Walter Dorwin Teague to design Ford Motor Company's pavilions and new-product exhibits at world's fairs, auto shows and dealer showrooms. As an industrial designer, Teague's forte was interiors of offices, buildings, cars, trains and planes. His first job with Ford, in 1933, was for the Century of Progress Expo in Chicago. Next, Teague designed Ford's presentation in the Albert Kahn-designed Rotunda in Chicago (1934). The gear-shaped Rotunda building was moved the next year to San Diego's California Pacific International Exposition and later to Ford headquarters in Dearborn. For the Century of Progress exhibit, Teague was presented with plans of the building and the items to be shown. From them he designed everything for the display—from the uniforms of attendants to the selection and arrangement of photomurals of the Ford factory, tiles for the floor, brass rails and the interiors of restrooms. Teague imposed a unifying color scheme on the 22 corporations which contributed parts and materials to the Ford car. A New Yorker profile of Teague in 1934 reported that Teague devised a plan of exhibit so that every raw material and every process from manufacturing to assembly appeared in its functional relation to all others. Edsel worked closely with Teague on the design for a wide variety of Ford's car exhibits and shows, as well as dealer showrooms, down to the details of the color of neon in signs. The 1939 World's Fair was Teague's biggest job, for which, he designed six major buildings for U.S. corporations, including Ford Motor Company. Teague was known as the most businesslike of all the industrial designers. He was a realist who insisted on collaboration with a company's production engineers. His thoroughness impressed industry, and he successfully worked with many corporations. Because of Edsel's collaboration with the designers of his homes and automobiles, we may be certain he also managed the design of FMC's public marketing ventures.
In 1935-36, Teague redesigned four rooms in Ford's home in Grosse Pointe Shores, in his dramatically modern style of sleek, custom-made furnishings in exotic hardwoods, recessed lighting reflected in mirrored surfaces, and leather-paneled walls. These rooms—the three boys' bedrooms and sitting rooms and a game room (see cover) on the main floor—were intended primarily for use by the Fords' teenaged children. Teague's signature streamlined seating, radios built into plastic- topped tables, and industrial metallic finishes in copper and brass provided comfortably contemporary rooms for the family's young men. Teague's custom-designed Steinway piano, of African bubinga wood, was made for the game room. It was noted at Steinway as one of a kind, never to be reproduced—and it wasn't.
The field of industrial design developed throughout the 1920s was a potent influence in American marketing as consumer goods were modernized for a new mass market. Streamlining, or smoothing the lines, of everything from toasters to automobiles for the illusion— if not the fact—of increased speed was everywhere. Newly developed appliances were created and manufactured in astounding quantities; and the most modern design was the most appealing as design obsolescence helped inspire the marketing and acquisition of consumer goods.
As a boy, Edsel Ford sketched designs and knew automobiles inside and out. Upon his marriage to Eleanor Clay in 1916, Edsel commissioned local architect Leonard Willeke to design interiors, furnishings and additions for their first two homes. Willeke was known for putting his clients' ideas first, and the designs he created for Edsel and Eleanor Ford were heavily influenced by the style and philosophy of the English arts and Crafts movement, the designs of Charles Rennie Macintosh and Charles Voysey, and the designs of influential German designer Peter Behrens.
Edsel and Eleanor were acquainted with the founders of both the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and Pewabic Pottery, and were consistent patrons of the contemporary arts of their time, having lived with custom-designed furnishings from the start of their marriage. In November 1919, Edsel and Eleanor moved to their second home, (on Jefferson Avenue), where Willeke again designed interiors. They also commissioned noted Midwest landscape architect Jens Jensen to design the gardens and grounds for that house.
By the mid-20s, Edsel and Eleanor felt the need for greater privacy in raising their family of four young children. The gangsterism of Prohibition led to an epidemic of kidnappings, and the resulting fears in wealthy families were great. In 1925, Edsel and Eleanor bought the property at Gaukler Point on Lake St. Clair from Henry Ford and added more acres to it for their new suburban home.
From their numerous trips to England, Edsel and Eleanor Ford determined that the style of the rambling, limestone countryhouse seen in the Cotswolds was their favorite. In 1926, Edsel Ford commissioned Albert Kahn, Detroit's busiest architect — and one whose apprenticeship was stimulated by William Morris's arts & crafts philosophy—to create their new home. Kahn also gave his clients what they wanted. The cult of the Cotswolds as home to William Morris and John Ruskin, the Guild of Handicrafts, village industries and Henry Ford's sentiments about industry and agriculture as seen at Greenfield Village, all influenced the Fords' stylistic decisions. While the style was, even in 1926, a conservative choice, it promised to be both comfortable and different from the reproductions of grand European houses favored by other wealthy Americans of the Fords' generation. In the late 1920s, Albert Kahn was designing vast industrial complexes for Ford Motor Company. But the style of the house was never in question. Edsel and Eleanor insisted on simplicity — like the Ford motor cars Edsel was to direct to production—devoid of unnecessary ornamentation and lines. There is no grand entry, yet it is no quaint cottage. And the modern rooms, which Edsel requested of Walter Dorwin Teague after Teague's successes with exhibit spaces for Ford Motor Company in 1935, were symbolic of Edsel's broad tastes and his dedication to contemporary design.
Jens Jensen's landscape design of the Gaukler Point property was, likewise, of a modernist esthetic, producing a romantic and idyllic setting, while seeming entirely natural in effect. Jensen's interpretation of Midwestern landscape made him a sought-after designer of estates among prominent families in the Midwest. His celebration of the horizontal, emphasis on native plants and appreciation of nature in all its cycles made Jensen's designs distinctively different from the formal garden styles of Europe and the Eastern U.S. Edsel and Eleanor wanted their estate designed to appear to have been planted there for centuries.
Edsel and Eleanor were so interested in knowing more about art, that in the mid-20s, they met for many private tutorials with William Valentiner, long-time director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Valentiner had come to Detroit from New York, where he was instrumental in the development of the new Museum of Modern Art. Edsel became a founding trustee of MoMA and also contributed mightily to the development of Detroit's art museum, serving on the Detroit Arts Commission from 1925 until his death.
When Valentiner conceived the project of having artist Diego Rivera transform the DIA's inner court with frescoed murals, Edsel Ford underwrote the costs. Edsel and Rivera formed a curious patron-artist relationship, with the communist Mexican artist finding a genuine admiration for Edsel's commitment to esthetics and design in his automotive industry. Rivera not only immortalized Edsel as patron in the murals, but his canvas portrait of Edsel depicts the president of Ford Motor Company before a triptych of the long blackboards used in the automotive-design process, upon which appears a sketch of the current design project, a 1932 Ford Coupe, which seems to spring from Edsel's mind. According to Valentiner's biographer, Rivera came to feel that Edsel, as a car designer, was fully qualified to be considered an artist in his own right.
In fact, there was no design program at Ford until Edsel created a design department in 1935. Working with E.T. Gregorie, Edsel ensured the redesign of the entire Ford line over the next four years. The widely admired, streamlined Lincoln Zephyr was introduced in 1936 to compete with Chrysler's Airflow. At Edsel's orders, thousands of prototype designs were created and scrapped over the late 30s. In 1939, Edsel introduced the Lincoln Continental by driving the prototype while on vacation in Palm Beach. It was honored by the Museum of Modern Art for design excellence, and said by Frank Lloyd Wright to be the most beautiful car in the world. Edsel and Gregorie worked together on designs. Edsel believed auto design was an artistic endeavor and treated all of his designers as a beneficent patron would treat artists. He gave support, understanding and respect.
Gregorie said later that his hands became Edsel's tools; that the designs were Edsel's not his (although Edsel never took a pencil in hand).
Edsel Ford was certainly present at the creation of the moderne and, as president of Ford Motor Company, gave it a central place in the lives of millions in the designs of Ford cars. His support of artists, designers, architects and landscape designers is seen in lasting reminders, of which the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House on Lake Shore Road is home to many.
Credits:
Photography courtesy of the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House
1. Seldes, Gilbert, Profiles: Industrial Classicist, New Yorker, 12/15/34
2. Brunk, T.W., Leonard B. Willeke, 1985, p. 89
3. Sterne, M., The Passionate Eye, 1980, quoted in Lacey, R., Ford: The Men and the Machine, 1986, p. 322
4. Dominguez, H., Edsel Ford and E. T. Gregorie, 1999, p. 134
