Rowena refined a methodology that led students to an understanding of what she called “the structure of abstract visual relationships.”
The Early Years (1900-1929)
The story of Rowena Reed Kostellow’s life and work is inseparable from the story of American design education. She was present at the creation of the country’s first industrial design department at Carnegie Technical Institute in 1934. Two years later, she came to Pratt to help found the department where she taught for fifty years and continued teaching private classes until just weeks before she died. Hers was a household name within the industrial design profession. However, she left an equally important legacy in the students who established and taught in industrial design departments throughout the country and passed on her principles and methods in their teaching.
Rowena taught two generations of teachers following Kostellow’s death, enlarging the circle of influence further. Rowena Reed made an enduring imprint on the teaching and practice of industrial design in the U.S. and beyond through her students-turned-educators. Gerald Gulotta taught foundation principles in Guadalajara, Mexico; Craig Vogel applied them successfully in New Zealand; Cheryl Akner-Koler teaches them in the Department of Industrial Design at the University College of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden.
Those who studied with Rowena Reed did not easily forget her. Although she was a small-boned woman of medium height who rarely raised her voice, she was a person of commanding presence, demanding enormous effort from her students. Abstraction does not come quickly to most fledgling designers. However, she insisted that an understanding of abstract visual order was at the heart of good design and that by perseverance and hard work, students could master that order. She refined a methodology for teaching that led students, step by step, to an understanding of and ability to use what she called “the structure of abstract visual relationships.”
Rowena Reed was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 6, l900. One of three children of a doctor and his wife, she grew up in a prominent family in a growing heartland city in the optimistic early years of a new century. Her upbringing gave her an unshakable confidence and a sense of entitlement that never left her. She entered the University of Missouri in 1918, intending to study art. “I did not know about three-dimensional design. I just took all the art courses I could take until there were no more,” she recalled in an interview in l982. “But even then, in my untrained way, I knew I was wasting my time. They were not teaching me anything. There was no order, organization, or continuity. Nothing you could build on.” She majored in journalism, worked for a while as a fashion illustrator, and, in l922, enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute.
There, she met , a Persian-born, European-educated artist who was beginning his teaching career as an instructor in painting. She was his student. He was, she said, “simply the most interesting man I had ever met.”
Kostellow was a powerful personality. A graduate of the University of Berlin with degrees in philosophy and psychology, he had declined an invitation to join the German army during World War I. He escaped the country through Holland, boarding a boat to the United States. He jumped ship in Boston Harbor to avoid immigration officials. He worked his way to New York and studied for several years at The Art Students’ League, The New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, and The National Academy of Design.
Kostellow felt the same about his art education as Rowena Reed felt about her own. In l947, he wrote: “My own experiences as an art student had not been too happy because of the rather haphazard way one had to acquire the necessary knowledge and experience to become self-supporting in the field of art. Many of my fellow students were armed with plenty of patience and visions of ultimate glory and spent years drawing casts in the national academies. It was a case of ‘life is short; art is long.’ However, to one who considered the graphic and plastic arts a legitimate profession and part of our economic set-up and expected a definite type of fundamental training to prepare for his career, the method was far from satisfactory.”
Rowena Reed and Alexander Kostellow were married in Kansas City, and she returned with him to New York. There, she studied sculpture with Alexander Archipenko. “I got a great deal from him,” she said. “His work is very profound and beautifully organized. However, after studying for a while, I realized that the one thing lacking in his work was an awareness of space.” That quest was to remain a driving force in her professional life. In 1929, the couple moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Kostellow had been hired to teach painting at the Carnegie Technical Institute. Rowena taught at a private school and worked as a sculptor. She and Alexander had a daughter, Adele, their only child. Together, they pursued their interest in developing a structured language for understanding and teaching visual arts.
Inventing Industrial Design Education (1933-1938)
In l933, Rowena went to Europe to study and spent a year on the continent, immersing herself in painting and sculpture. She returned to a bustling, industrious city. Pittsburgh was the heart of the steel industry, and despite the depression that ravaged much of the country, chimneys belched, machines bellowed, and business hummed. Moreover, there were new currents in the air.
A decade earlier, the American industry had begun to turn to specialists in the arts to help design and market products that would appeal to a growing audience of potential consumers. By the early 1930s, a small cadre of designers had emerged: Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey, Gilbert Rohde, Norman Bel Geddes, John Vassos, and Donald Dohner. These pioneers were staking out a new field, laying the groundwork for the industrial design profession.
Donald Dohner taught at Carnegie Tech. One day, he was approached by an executive from Westinghouse, where he was a consultant, and, as Rowena Reed told the story, “The man said, ‘We have something out there in the plant that we do not quite know what to do with. It is a new material, and we want some ideas about how to use it.’ Well, Donald went out to look. He saw big steel rollers with a rather innocuous material coming off them in sheets. First, he said, ‘Let’s color it,’ so they created beautiful Mondrian-like reds, yellows, and blues, which made the material much more appealing. Then he said, ‘Let’s spin it.’ So they spun some beautiful contemporary trays that people would be delighted to buy. After a while, they made them deeper and added a few bowls and other simple shapes. The material was the melamine plastic stuff that now covers all of our homes and all of our lives. They called it Micarta.”
Dohner’s experience convinced Kostellow that the opportunities in American industry were there for the taking. The time had come to formalize design training for a new design discipline. He had already spent years experimenting with ways to bring focus and order to art education and gaining direct experience as a design consultant to several firms in the area. So he and Dohner went to the Carnegie Tech administration and proposed establishing a degree-granting program in industrial design. They successfully argued their case, and in l936, the Department of Industrial Design, the first of its kind in the United States, graduated its first students.
The industrial design experiment opened a new world for Rowena Reed. It fired her imagination and focused her interest on three-dimensional design. In l938, she became formally involved in the design venture. In 1934, Pratt Institute Dean James Boudreau invited Donald Dohner to establish an industrial design department. He persuaded Kostellow to follow him to Brooklyn to develop the curriculum and teach courses in color and design. He asked Rowena to teach abstraction. Arthur Pulos writes of their early work at Pratt: “With Alexander Kostellow representing the philosophical, Rowena Reed the aesthetic, and Dohner the practical, they laid the triangular foundation for Pratt’s program in industrial design.”
Frederick Whiteman, Robert Kolli, Ivan Rigby, and Rolph Fjelde joined them, and Eva Zeisel and Victor Canzani followed soon after.
“In the beginning, it was so great because we all spoke the same language,” Rowena recalled. “It was awfully exciting. We were young and inconsiderate — the only way to get things done.”
Their first significant accomplishment was developing a study curriculum for all first-year students in the Art School. It was called, appropriately, “Foundation” and was the first course of its kind specifically designed to address the requirements of the American art student and American society. It grew from Kostellow’s experiences with pictorial structure and organizing the axes on the canvas and Reed’s experiments with visual organization in three dimensions. It became the prototype for foundation programs in many other schools nationwide.
Alexander Kostellow described the intention of the program. “The goal was to supply students not with disjointed bits of information but rather with an organized approach to the mechanics of design and the necessary inner discipline to carry out assigned problems to develop an understanding of the elements of design, of structure, of the organizational forces which control them, and an ability to apply this knowledge to a variety of situations in designing for self-expression or industry.”
The program was general in its approach to the visual disciplines because, Kostellow wrote, “Experience proves that specialized courses in design, like other programs devoted to the development of technical skills, restrict the esthetic potential of the student. Practical approaches rarely bring forth creative designers of importance. At best, they produce skilled technicians.”
Frederick Whiteman, who taught 2-D courses in the foundation year, saw foundation studies filling a vacuum that the academy itself had created. “Under the old apprentice system, students could work on parts of a work, but only the master could put it together,” he declared. “The commercial art schools took away the master. Now, all students drew fragments but never learned to put them together; they never learned to design. Foundation taught how it all went together.”
Three years after Kostellow and Dohner established the Industrial Design department at Carnegie Tech, the New Bauhaus opened in Chicago. Mies moved it to ITT in 1938, later becoming the Institute of Design within the Illinois Institute of Technology. Directed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, it promoted the course of study established by Walter Gropius at the original Bauhaus.
The Pratt and Bauhaus Foundation programs were similar in some ways. Both approaches were rooted in common intellectual and artistic assumptions. Their methodologies drew on modern scientific methods and applied them to teaching art-making fundamentals. They identified elements such as line, shape, form, space, and color and systematically investigated each. Students needed a thorough understanding of the parts before attempting a completed work.
Both approaches shifted the focus from aesthetic development and teaching to solving aesthetic problems. The reason for arranging forms or shapes was removed from the religious, metaphysical, or moral sphere and placed squarely in the perceptual one. Both proposed that there could be more than one correct solution to a problem—contrary to the classic academic notion—and that such solutions required nurturing personal inspiration and individual talent.
The Bauhaus attempted to reconcile the artist’s aesthetic insights, the craftsman’s quality, and the machine’s technological advances in its practical agenda. It declared that the artist should design with or for the machine. Although Kostellow’s program was not interested in the crafts, it shared the Bauhaus goal of educating designers for an industrial, machine-driven economy.
However, there were differences between the two approaches. Kostellow declared: “The introduction of ‘Die neue Sachlichkeit,’ the clarification of functional design, was the closest to an organized approach I had yet encountered. Nevertheless, it lacked compactness and basic integration for what we wanted to accomplish at Pratt Institute; it possessed some contradictory elements; and in many instances indulged in too lengthy and pragmatic experimentation for experimentation’s sake.” In response to the Bauhaus dictum that form follows function, he declared, “I have never agreed with the premise that function as such gives birth to esthetic expression. I feel that function is an expression of a time and that esthetic reactions influence man-made form, and we, in turn, are influenced by them.”
This argument was key to Rowena Reed’s perspective. She was adamant about the primacy of design’s visual and aesthetic aspects. She defined aesthetic expression as the designer’s raison d’être.
The Bauhaus approached the study of form from the perspective of architecture. Kostellow came at it from a different point of view. “Alexander Kostellow was aware of the Bauhaus early on when it was still engaged in diverse experiments and was very dynamic,” explains Craig Vogel. “The stuff was in the air before he left Europe. However, Alexander spoke a much broader avant-garde language than the Bauhaus. He was dealing with spatial perspectives. The difference was that Alexander wanted to start a design program, Gropius wanted to start an architecture program, and Mies (who succeeded Moholy Nagy at IIT) was even more reductive than Gropius. For him, everything flowed from architecture, which was not what Alexander had in mind.
“Alexander was closer to Peter Behrens, the father of corporate design. (Behrens, a German architect, designed several influential early modern buildings, including the AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin in 1909. He was one of the first to develop architecture for industrial buildings based on function and structural character and the first artist to take on the whole range of corporate design, from identity to building fixtures). World War I cut off Behrens’s work, so he was probably not well known to Kostellow, who left Europe at the start of the war.
“Kostellow said, ‘There is more manufacturing here than you can shake a stick at, and it is undisciplined.’ Like Behrens, his question was how to give technology a face. That is still the big question in design today.”
The debate about the relationship between industrial design education and architecture that heated up in the 1940s pitted the Gropius and Bauhaus-based camp, which supported the teaching of industrial design in schools of architecture, against design advocates who saw it more logically taught in schools of art. Donald Dohner defended the latter position for Pratt, and his argument won the day.
There was another essential difference. “Alexander and Rowena introduced the consideration of space, as distinguished from just objects, as an important element in three-dimensional design,” explains Richard Welch, who taught foundation courses at Pratt for over a quarter century. “The Bauhaus was more interested in the object.”
The differences in educational methodology between the two approaches were not all rooted in philosophy. There was also a radically different understanding of the American context. Kostellow, like Gropius, was rooted in a European perspective. However, he held an advantage over the German architect because he had come to this country earlier and enthusiastically embraced American culture. He lived in large cities and traveled and worked in the Midwest. (Frederick Whiteman says Kostellow ended up in Kansas City after being thrown off a train for gambling.) He was open to American experience. He liked the spirit of the place, and he understood how it worked. Ronald Beckman, who studied with Reed and Kostellow at Pratt in the fifties and now directs the industrial design program at Syracuse University, observes: “Kostellow was not just German, he was also Persian. He was brought up to be comfortable with ambiguity and differences and to manipulate the ambiguity. America is the most ambiguous place in the world. And he loved it.”
Finally, unlike the Bauhaus, Kostellow approached the challenge of educating industrial designers as a social experiment. He saw art schools filled with talented, enthusiastic young people who needed to earn their livelihoods. Moreover, he knew few would achieve greatness (or solvency) as artists among them. It was a matter of supply and demand. Here was the talent — ready, willing, and capable of being made able — and there was industry, turning out a steady stream of formally inept products. These young artists could help. They could make a difference in everyone’s quality of life and make a decent living. He created a program to make it happen.
Creating a Community (1938-1954)
The years from 1938 until Alexander Kostellow’s death in 1954 were a time of extraordinary cohesiveness in Pratt’s Foundation program and its growing industrial design department. Reed and Kostellow presided over a true intellectual and artistic community—people of like minds working together toward a common goal. Their apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, was a gathering place for teachers and students. Colleagues often joined them for weekends at their house near the western New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, where Alexander enjoyed cooking for their guests. The shared intellectual commitment and cooperative teaching practice that united the community provided a remarkable learning experience.
“The secret was in the synergy, the simultaneity,” explains Ron Beckman. “You took a battery of courses in two and three-dimensional design, and the work in one class reinforced what you were doing in other classes. In 2-D design, students began drawing simple things in line, while in 3-D, Rowena would have them working in wire; it was the same line in three dimensions. In nature study, they might go to the Museum of Natural History and sketch animals on paper. Then, in 3-D, they would make three-dimensional sketches of animals, and the 2-D teacher would have them draw the abstract equivalent of animals in line. Meanwhile, Alexander gave color lectures to lay the theoretical foundation, and Dean Boudreau lectured on art history and the use of color in the art of Giotto and Rembrandt. The synchronized, simultaneous, reinforced learning experience was the secret. Years later, synergistics got into the lexicon of science. However, Alexander Kostellow recognized early on that experience was holistic, not episodic.”
The industrial design department flourished and continued to train designers throughout the Second World War. Kostellow set up special programs to prepare design students to aid the war effort. Joseph Parriott, who graduated in 1942 and returned to teach and head the Department of Industrial Design in 1966, recalls the war years. “Kostellow understood that the kind of thinking ID students were doing at Pratt was essential to certain parts of the service. In 1940, as the war heated up, he set up a fantastic program in camouflage for those of us carrying draft cards. I was designing from the minute I went into the Corps of Engineers. In Paris, I met with Ivan Rigby and Robert Kolli, who worked on the models for the Normandy landing and the Rhine River crossing. We all took our design training right through the war.”
In the decade between 1945 and l955, Pratt Industrial Design got a terrific boost of energy from World War II and Korean War veterans returning to school on the GI Bill. These older, highly ambitious students were intelligent, focused, and had life experience. Some of them had families living in temporary barracks on the library lawn. They attacked their schoolwork with no-nonsense energy and an eye on the prize. Their presence could be intimidating for other students, many of them teenage kids just out of high school. Designer and publisher James Fulton recalls the late 40’s. “Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed on the first day of school, I walked into a design class, and a 28-year-old Captain out of the Air Corps sat down next to me. It was daunting. These guys had a tremendous reservoir of talent.”
By l953, the Pratt Industrial Design program had gone from a three-year certificate course of study to a four-year degree program. Kostellow was head of the department, and he added courses in humanities, the “technics of civilization,” and social and economic studies. He believed the best designer was a well-read, culturally and historically sophisticated person prepared to bring an informed perspective to the work.
He also believed that the industrial designer had to be a realist. He did not want to train designers “who tend to look over the marketplace rather than belong to it,” he believed that industry should be a participating factor.
He collaborated with several leading companies in the U.S. to establish and equip Pratt’s Experimental Design Laboratory and work on mutual projects. Participating companies included producers of basic materials such as Monsanto Chemicals (Plastics Division) and Reynolds Metals; large distributors such as Sears and Roebuck and Shell Oil; and manufacturers such as the Elgin National Watch Company, Gorham Silver, and E.A. Electrical Laboratories. Member companies had workrooms/offices on campus and rotated staff designers to advise on student projects and help with independent research.
At mid-century, Pratt was one of the premier design schools in the world. Its graduating students were being snapped up by industry and starting firms. Others went on to found and teach in industrial design departments across the country and around the globe. Rowena and Alexander were the center of the circle.
“They were very different but complementary,” says William Katavolos, Professor of Architecture at Pratt, who studied with Kostellow and, in the 1960s, taught with Rowena in the Industrial Design department. “When Rowena and Alexander were teaching side by side, I do not think another school in the country could have matched it. If you studied with both of them, you would get a broad education. His lectures were extraordinary and never a boring moment. You would get into color reversals, and he would drag in Newton. Rowena could not lecture like that, but I never saw Alexander give a crit like Rowena could. There was romantic conflict. It was Arthurian.”
“I think there was a balance between them, between the aesthetic and the functional, similar to the balance between Ray and Charles Eames,” Craig Vogel says. “I think Alexander owned the mind of it—the logical system—but Rowena owned the soul.”
In the summer of l954, Reed and Kostellow went to Detroit to work on the design of General Motors Frigidaire’s “Kitchen of the Future.” While in Detroit, Kostellow suffered a heart attack and died. He was 58 years old.
Born Abstract (1954-1972)
“Alexander Kostellow was a juggler—a genius at keeping all the balls in the air,” Ron Beckman says. “Rowena Reed only juggled one ball, but she could do everything with it.” Three-dimensional form-making was Rowena Reed’s magnificent obsession. After the death of her partner in life and work, she took the study of three-dimensional abstraction into an entirely new realm.
“Kostellow created the foundation course in three-dimensional visual abstraction that Rowena Reed considered key, based on years of his study of the abstract intelligence of the best of Western art and design,” explained William Fogler, who studied with Reed and Kostellow at Pratt and became one of the first of many former students to join the Industrial Design faculty. “In contrast, the advanced courses in visual abstraction created by her were based only on her, on what she saw. His contribution was eclectic; it embraces the best insights found in Western art; her contribution was egocentric; it glows with the insight of one majestically gifted woman. Alexander Kostellow explained the difference. He said, “It took me many years to learn abstraction. Miss Reed was born abstract.”
“She was not directly connected intellectually or professionally to anyone,” said Fogler. “She disconnected from her husband, the constructivists, and European design. She was a complex person—and very original. Her insight conveyed that one cannot create a three-dimensional object or space on paper. She knew she was teaching the potential depth of the abstract visual stimulus.”
“It has been thirty or forty years since many of us were in class with her,” says Midori Imatake, a designer who practices in Japan. “But our appreciation for her process and philosophy has deepened. I believe that the wisdom and validity of what she taught has been confirmed by what science has learned about the brain’s visual function.”
The 1960s spelled hard times for structured approaches to education. “Foundation flies in the face of the cafeteria/self-feeding approach,” says Eugene Garfinkle, who taught at Pratt during that beleaguered time. Foundation became a rear guard activity. Many of Rowena’s original colleagues had died or retired. She still had around her a small group of dedicated teachers from the early years, including Ivan Rigby and Robert Kolli (who had become chairman of the department after Kostellow’s death), and others whom she had trained: Bill Fogler, Richard Welch, Gerry Gulotta among them. However, there were fewer full-time faculty members and educators from schools and disciplines who did not honor what they saw as outdated or irrelevant methods. Although preserving Foundation looked like a losing battle, Rowena would not cede defeat.”
Rowena Reed became head of Pratt’s Industrial Design department in 1962. During the next four years, under her direction, students in the department prepared two important exhibitions of their work: one in 1965 at the IBM Gallery in Manhattan and the other at Expo 67 in Montreal, where Pratt was one of three American design schools chosen to participate in the ICSID Designer’s Pavilion. Deadlines, budgets, and students strained nearly beyond endurance did not deter her from her inviolable practice, which was to scrutinize, criticize, and do it over and over until it was right. Sculptor Jon Pai, who studied with Rowena in the mid-60s, recalls, “We were preparing the exhibit at the IBM gallery. I walked into the space, and there were faculty just sitting there, looking glum. They weren’t saying a word. Then, I saw Rowena across the room, standing by herself, her arms folded, holding her ground. She didn’t like the color of the wall; she demanded that it be repainted, and she wouldn’t let go.”
When she retired from full-time teaching in 1966, the name Rowena Reed was synonymous with Pratt industrial design. “The Pratt approach was the Rowena Kostellow approach,” Arthur Pulos wrote. “Rowena brought the preoccupation—if that is the word—for plastic form to Pratt. She saw forms as the one thing the industrial designer can do that no one else can do.”
“She became,” Bill Fogler asserts, “the premier arbiter of form and space in industrial design.”
Rowena Reed was named Professor Emeritus and continued to teach her Space Analysis course for twenty more years. She judged sculpture and design competitions and lectured in schools and professional organizations throughout the country and in Europe. She acted as an outspoken advocate for industrial design education.
“Industrial design started as a reaction against the purely mechanical work that the engineers were doing,” she declared. “There was a need for someone to design objects that make a definite design statement. Industrial designers were brought in to save the industry—and they did. Industrial designers put industry on its feet in this country but have never gotten credit for it. Our government has never supported schools of design as they do in some European countries. And Europe supports design in other ways. Money spent on public relations creates a climate favorable to good design and makes the consumer more aware of it. This, in turn, makes the designer feel that his contribution is important. This country, which has benefited the most from design, has given the profession little recognition and support.”
“She really was a missionary,” sculptor John Pai says. “She had that missionary spirit—an idealization of how society could become transformed—and a belief that designers could do it.”
The design statement she looked to industrial designers to make was a statement about the visual qualities of objects. “She did not care where you put the motor,” Bruce Hannah says. Moreover, Louis Nelson adds, “Her point of view about function was that you learned about it somewhere else.”
In a speech delivered in Paris at the 1962 International Conference of Industrial Designers, she chastised those who would reduce design to the pursuit of structural or functional solutions. “They refuse to concede that visual organization may be a discipline in itself, and necessary to the designer, or that the conceptual thinking of a design-oriented person can approach that of the engineer.” Rowena warned her students: “Never let function be an excuse for a bad design.”
During the 1970s, she was awarded “The Bronze Apple” design award by the New York Chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America and the “Design in the Americas” award of the IDSA Congress I in Mexico City. In 1972, Pratt awarded her its “Distinguished Visiting Faculty Award.”
Semi-retirement had its drawbacks. Rowena Reed was intensely social and had never organized her life to allow much time alone. As she entered her 70s, the apartment in Queens, where she had lived for thirty-five years, seemed far from the center of activity. 1972, she gave it up and moved to an unfinished loft in SOHO.
Rehabilitation of the neighborhood between Houston and Canal had just started. Artists and designers, including some of her former students, were beginning to move in, and Rowena felt the promise. “I think this will be an interesting place to live,” she said, and, against the judgment of family and friends, she took possession of the big brick-walled loft overlooking West Houston Street.
She relished the open space, separating living and working spaces with bookcases and placing her bed in the center of the loft. She designed a galley kitchen with storage below the counters so she would not have to reach up, and without an oven because the only one beautiful enough to live with was far beyond her budget. (A former student bought her a toaster oven.) She brought her Eames chairs, her grand piano, and Jacques, the Siamese cat. Her beloved Volvo stayed behind. She had Alexander’s paintings hung high up on the walls. Once a month, a local florist delivered an oversized bundle of laurel, which she stood in a large container near the door.
She became a familiar figure in the neighborhood. She was the fine-boned lady in a cape and gaucho hat who bought gourmet food at Dean and DeLuca, had her red hair colored and coiffed at a salon on West Broadway, and shopped with the ingenues at Agnes B. “She loved good things, including couture clothes and fine food,” remembers RitaSue Siegel, a student in the 1960s who is the principal of a leading design search and consultancy firm. “She was quite poor, living on a small retirement pension, but when exposed to the luxuries of life, she took them in stride as if she were used to them.”
The Saturday Class (1972-1988)
At the request of several former students, she began holding tutorials in the loft. “The Saturday Class” attracted working designers and architects seeking the abstract experiences and rigorous critique that only she provided. In her part-time teaching at Pratt, she focused on some new “experiences” she had begun to develop during her final years as a full-time teacher. These were the Space Analysis exercises. (Students called them “space boxes.”) They were an extension of an early foundation problem in architectonics, an ambitious exploration of negative and positive space and the fulfillment of her deepest interest. “I respond to the whole concept of space so strongly,” she said. “I have seen people very sensitive to form or organic volume but practically blind regarding space. I want to make them more aware.” She became engrossed in expanding her understanding of spatial relationships and raising her students’ sensitivity.
There are those, like ceramist Eva Zeisel, who taught with Reed in the early Pratt days and believed she was responsible for creating a “style” in design. “She influenced generations of students,” Zeisel says, “and asymmetry was one of her main ways of expressing her ideas. The fact that it had to be asymmetrical was a style. I do not know where it came from—this antagonism to classical organization. But through her teaching, it became the prevalent aspect of thousands of objects and buildings.”
Gerry Gulotta believes it came from her own need to explore and discover. “Symmetry is a beautiful concept, but what is symmetrical is seen instantly,” he explains. “There is no adventure. No investigation. For her, it was just never part of the deal.”
Reed justified the focus on asymmetry in her teaching as a pedagogical strategy. “Symmetry can be beautiful, but symmetry is easy,” she told her students. “Any dancer can stand straight on two feet. Assuming a dynamic posture with one leg in the air is difficult. We demand the dynamic axis because most people cannot handle it. You strengthen your design muscles by becoming disciplined and learning to do the most difficult things. That will allow you to express yourself more clearly and strongly because you can control what you want to say.”
Lucia DeRespinis, a designer and teacher who studied with Reed and Kostellow in the early 1950s, explains. “Rowena did influence her students’ designs through her enthusiasm for dynamic movement. She did not get as excited about quiet, static design.” However, some resist the idea that she fostered a “style.” “There was no more of a ‘style’ being taught in Miss Reed’s class than in a strictly regimented ballet class,” Gina Caspi insists. “The exercises are specific and pointed to strengthening weaknesses in given areas. However, as each dancer uses that discipline for expression, so have each of Miss Reed’s students.”
“Rowena maintained a focus on the process,” explains environment/exhibit designer Ralph Applebaum. “Not on product. She did not lead students to forms that dialog with style because she kept the focus on the eyes and feelings.”
She was less concerned with any particular formal solution than she was with the use of the cultivated intuition that made beautiful formal solutions possible. “She was intuitive and analytical,” says George Schmidt, an industrial designer and teacher who studied with Rowena in the 1960s. “Her contribution was helping her students intuitively understand form and space. There are not the same rules in physics or math, but there are rules you can work by. It is a matter of understanding relationships, which is more of an intuitive experience than a practical one.”
Rowena Reed influenced her students as much through her presence in the classroom as by her principles. She spoke softly and authoritatively in complete, precise sentences. She used physical gestures with conscious deliberation and to great advantage. (Once, looking at a snapshot of herself taken by a student, she exclaimed, “Notice how three-dimensionally I’m sitting!”)
She could be alternately subtle and disarming. Moreover, she had a relentless sense of purpose. A typical Rowena class consisted of a brief lecture followed by hours and hours of excruciatingly minute critique. “Frail, intense, and all business, she would perch on the corner of a desk and literally preach design,” recalls Gene Grossman, founder and principal of Anspach Grossman Enterprise.
Then, she focused on her students’ work, one project at a time. She would stare for a very long time, turning the exercise around and around, talking to what she saw from every angle. She would comment on organization and balance and, using a pointer, suggest trimming an eighth inch here or adding a sixteenth there. She demanded that all the students in the class focus on each individual’s effort with her. She believed that students learned from other’s successes and failures, as well as their own. It was a singular experience for students to have someone look at their work that long and hard. Her powers of discrimination were uncanny. Her demands on students to create solution after solution for every problem could be exhausting. She would stay until the last student exercise had been dissected.
“I still remember how she looked at a design,” recalls Frank Grunwald, who studied with Rowena in the late 1950s and is today Manager of Global Design and Research at Thomson Consumer Electronics. “How closely she scrutinized it. From all angles. From close-up and a distance. How her eyes analyzed each line and the movement of each plane. She was so intense. Nothing could distract her. She was always searching, looking for answers, trying to understand the form. Not just the surface of the form, but also the inner structure.”
“There was something very pure about her communication,” says Pamela Waters, a designer who studied with Rowena in the early 1960s. “It was not about you. It was always about the work.”
Not every student could endure the scrutiny. However, the ones who did relished the experience. Debera Johnson, former chair of Pratt’s industrial design department, recalls that as a student, “twelve people were trying to get as close as possible to Rowena’s head to stare into these boxes. We would be there for six hours doing it until, at the end of the day, we lost the light.”
“Teaching for her was a ritual,” Bill Katavolos explains. “She went into a crit so completely empty it was almost painful to watch. She had no preconceived notions whatsoever. She would look at the work, turn it around, warm up, and go on for hours. I have always admired the quality of going in with an open mind. It is the sign of a great teacher.”
Richard Welch says, “Rowena had the greatest eye in the universe. You could go back after 10 years, and she would say, “Yes, but this doesn’t quite work.” Her attention and standards of judgment were the same whether she was evaluating a senior project or a modern classic. “I forget who I am talking to, and I talk to the design,” she once explained.
“You could go to a museum opening of a deconstructivist show with her, and all the white-hot intellectuals would be there,” recalls Bill Katavolos. “Rowena would examine their work as if it were third-year student work. She would give a crit—out loud—to an audience in white tie and tails that thinks it is at the leading edge of things when it’s at the tail end of what this woman had been doing for 40 years.”
The crit never ended. Bruce Hannah and Andrew Morrison, Rowena’s students in the mid-60s, went on to design furniture for Knoll International. Hannah recalls the gala celebration marking the introduction of the Morrison/Hannah office chair. “Leading designers and architects were there, the press, and Rowena was there. A crowd gathered around as she talked about the chair’s design and showered us with compliments. The interview ended, the crowd dispersed, and Rowena slipped away. About a half hour later, I felt a tug on my sleeve. “Bruce,” she said very softly, “the rear curve of the arm is okay, but the front curve needs a little work.”
She remembered her students’ work better than they remembered their own. Years later, she would recall, in detail, one student’s solution to the fragment problem or another’s beautiful exercise in wire. (She could not, however, remember where she put her glasses or keys, and almost every one of her acquaintances was, at one time or another, drawn into the search. Sometimes, she misplaced bigger things. Students love to tell the story of when she drove to Boston for a design conference and traveled home with a group on the train. She was back in Brooklyn for half a day before remembering her car was parked on a Boston street.)
She was completely engaged in her own time and lived continuously in the present tense. Even those who knew her for decades knew little about her childhood, family, or past. She did not reminisce. The few stories she told about her early life were stories that established the ground for the current experiences that absorbed her interest. She had a gift for friendship and nurtured long-term, personal relationships with many former students. They phoned at all hours and came and went from her apartment, driving her to and from Pratt and taking her to lunch and dinner. They escorted her on her travels and slept on her couch when they came to town. They ran errands, helped her sort through piles of papers and slides, and brought her out to the country for weekends after she gave up her own country home.
She was a mentor to many students over the years, especially women. In the 1950s and 1960s, she encouraged female industrial design graduates to enter industries and companies—like General Motors—where few women had gone before. As the dominant figure in a primarily male discipline and profession, her encouragement bore the force of authority. Several of the women she mentored became serious disciples for her message. “She was teaching me not just for my education but to make me a teacher. To help me carry the torch,” Gina Caspi says. Caspi taught 3-D Foundation with absolute fidelity to Rowena’s language and method, and Kate Hixon assiduously preserves Rowena’s language and curriculum in Space Analysis courses.
Rowena Reed was committed to teaching visual principles through structured experiences and was convinced that designers could not do their best work without them. She never wavered in her conviction that the experiences were essential to creating form. She liked to make the analogy with music. “Symphony musicians do not play by ear; most artists are playing by ear. There can be a discipline of visual relationships comparable to the discipline of music, and it should be learned. Some students think, ‘This will destroy my personality; this will take something away from me. I cannot think when I feel.’ But, if you cannot think and feel at the same time, you had better not try to get an education at all.”
She was adamant that the only way to create a three-dimensional form was to work three-dimensionally. It was her mantra. “All three-dimensional projects should be designed three-dimensionally. You cannot develop a good three-dimensional design on paper. That is like drawing a piece of sculpture. You have to deal with negative space and cannot do that in two dimensions.”
She waged a life-long war of words with the architecture profession over its two-dimensional approach to teaching and practice. “Are you drawing?” she asked a startled student in a Space Analysis class. Then, shaking her head—as if to say I know what I am going to hear—she asked, “What did you study before you came to this class?” When the student innocently allowed how it was architecture, she counted to ten, slowly and out loud. “Well, that is how the architectural profession works, and it is wrong,” she finally announced. “You must learn how to think directly in three dimensions. If you know how to organize in space three-dimensionally, you can learn how to draw three-dimensionally, but it is not the way to design.”
Many of the students in the Saturday class were architects seeking to compensate for their lack of three-dimensional training. At Pratt, George Schmidt recalls, “A number of students came down to foundation from the graduate program and architecture because they had heard about this person who talked about space as no one else did.”
She never hesitated to inform any student that they did not understand what they were doing because they had not taken foundation—Pratt Foundation. “It’s like mathematics,” she would say. “I suppose you could start with calculus if you are really smart. But, sometimes, someone will ask you to solve a problem in a long division. No matter how good you are, you will be better with foundation than without it.”
Rowena sometimes told her students, “You don’t feel this yet, but ten years from now, you will hear my voice inside your head, and because you can finally see it, you will understand it.”
Rowena Reed suffered a heart attack in the fall of l988. Just as family and friends had surrounded her throughout her life, she was surrounded by them in her final days. Near the end, as her eyesight failed, she mourned her inability to carry on her daily ritual reading of the New York Times. She died on September 14, l988.
She insisted always on the designer’s primary role as form giver.