Norman Bel Geddes

Norman Bel Geddes is an American born Artist born in 1893. Bel Geddes began work as a stage and set designer in theatre and cinema before he turned his designing skills to creating designs for more specific areas such as motor vehicles. Geddes went on to create designs for cars, radios, cocktail sets and even lamp shades, each carrying his unique modernistic style. This modern and slightly abstract style that Geddes carries is present throughout all of his work, giving his designs and bold curves and darting angles, giving his work that futuristic edge that helped Geddes build his career. Because of this individual style, Geddes work seemed to hold no boundaries and carry a promising glow of the future for his now hugely growing audience.

Geddes went on to create work that has helped shape the modern world today, from creating designs for state of the art vehicles including aircrafts and cars to visualising lamp shades of the future.

After Geddes moved his career in this direction he worked for many companies, designing products for them, including cars for the motor vehicle company Chrysler. Companies seemed to be interested in Geddes work because the designs he was created were boldly showing the public what tomorrow could hold.

Despite all this work, Geddes is still best known for the work he did for the oil company “Shell” at the New York World Fair in 1939, Futurama…

Geddes created Futurama, a miniature model of world his interpretation of what the city of New York would look like after motor vehicles were introduced to every day life.

The model was huge, displaying vast motorways, zooming cars, towering skyscrapers and busy streets, all littered between giant building blocks and freeways.

Thousands of visitors came to witness would Geddes had created, seeing for the first time what he was now calling „The City Of Tomorrow‟.

The model was designed to show civilians how simple and care free manoeuvring around the modern city would be, due to the vast numbers of wide freeways and thousand of personally owned vehicles.

Geddes became renowned for his work on the Futurama project, as he was able to show the masses what „The City Of Tomorrow‟ would be like, with the ease of travelling around the busy city in motor vehicles and working amongst towering building blocks.

To this day, Futurama remains the project that Geddes us most known for, although the modern day city doesn't closely resemble his interpretation, it can be said that there are huge similarities between Geddes vision and the modern day city of New York, as they both highly consist of huge buildings and busy roads.

To this day Geddes designs of futuristic prowess are littered throughout every day life, although they may not be as prominent as he first envisioned, the foundation of his revolutionary creations are truly amongst us today.