George Sakier (1897 - 1965) American Industrial Designer

Collection of ten vases designed by George Sakier

George Sakier (1897 – 1965) was a multifaceted artist who worked as an interior designer, painter, art director, engineer, and packaging designer. He was also a pioneering industrial designer in the United States. His career was as varied as it was extensive, and his influence on the development of a modern design aesthetic was felt not only in the United States but also in Europe.

Sakier emerged as an arbiter of modernism and one of the first industrial designers during this period, particularly in the 1930s. His designs for the American Radiator Company’s bathroom and kitchen fixtures reveal some of the earliest manifestations of a uniquely American modernist style. Sakier quietly disseminated his modern aesthetic throughout the country through the market appeal and affordability of his industrially designed products.

Education

From the late 1910s he studied at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn New York; Columbia University Graduate School in New York and painting in Paris.

Biography

At the age of 19, he published the textbook Machine Design and Descriptive Geometry. He began working as an engineer, designing automatic machinery; and was introduced to art during World War I by painting camouflage patterns. He taught machine design and engineering mathematics after the war. In 1925, he was appointed assistant art director of French Vogue, and he campaigned for the restoration of the Mayan collection housed in Paris’ Trocadéro. The collection was subsequently put on view.

Returning to New York, he became art director of the magazines Modes and Manners and Harper’s Bazaar. From 1927, he was head of the bureau of design development of the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation, where he designed bathtubs and wash basins, and was simultaneously an independent designer.

Kitchen Designed by George Sakier’, 1939. From Decorative Art 1939 -…
Kitchen Designed by George Sakier’, 1939. From Decorative Art 1939 – The Studio Year Book, edited by C. G. Holme. [The Studio Ltd., London, 1939]. Artist Unknown. Get premium, high resolution news photos at Getty Images

He was one of the few staff designers in an American company during the 1920s. From 1929, he designed for Fostoria Glass in Moundsville, West Virginia, for which he executed a distinctive and extensive collection of domestic glassware.

Through Sakier’s efforts at Fostoria, American open-stock glassware for the first time became more popular than European. Sakier believed in furnishing the public with what it wanted rather than what it needed; he raised no objection when one of his designs was copied and sold in inexpensive variety-store chains.

Bowl, ca. 1930. Brooklyn Museum designed by George Sakier

Sakier designed the first prefabricated bathrooms, available as complete units or as separate components; 233 units were first installed in a Washington apartment building in 1933—34. His freelance-design activities produced $15,000 to $25,000 income a year by the mid-1930s.

Exhibitions

In c1918, he showed canvases at the Galerie Julien Lévy in Paris, and a one-person 1949 exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. His work included in 1934 ‘The Industrial Arts Exposition,’ National Alliance of Art, Rockefeller Center, New York; 1939 ‘New York World’s Fair.’

Sources

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The design encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing.

Klein, C. (2012). The Quiet Dissemination of American Modernism: George Sakier’s Designs for American Radiator. Design Issues, 28(1), 81-90. Retrieved May 10, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41427812

Now Important 20th Century Design. Sakier, George collection of ten object sotheby’s n08920lot6fv3den. (n.d.). http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.56.html/2012/20th-century-design-n08920.

Wikipedia contributors. (2020, December 15). George Sakier. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:42, May 10, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Sakier&oldid=994487141

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He began his work as an instrument builder for the Bacharach Instrument Company in Pittsburgh. He then moved on to Owens-Illinois Glass Company, where he developed a lifetime interest in glass. He established small laboratories to create new glass batches and fabricate small glass objects while in command of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company milk-bottle plant.…
Harvey Littleton (1922 – 2013) American glassware designer

Between 1939-42 and 1946-47, he studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, receiving a bachelor’s degree in design. In 1941 and 1949-51, he studied Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, receiving a master’s degree in ceramics. In 1945, he was a student at the Brighton School of Art, Brighton, under Nora Braden’s…
Ray and Charles Eames a partnership

They were full collaborators as husband and wife. Design is infrequently a solitary endeavour, and husband-and-wife teams are not uncommon. The collaborative nature of the Eames work, on the other hand, was easily obscured by Charles’s widespread public recognition as an individual designer and thinker.Read More →
John Eberson (1875 – 1954) American Designer famous for the atmospheric theatre

John Eberson was an american designer who was known for his cinema décors. One of his earliest, the 1923 Majestic Theatre in Houston, Texas, was a loosely recreated garden of a late-Renaissance palazzo in Italy. Through his workshop Michelangelo Studios, he was was successful at producing elaborate plasterwork for his theatre décors in Spanish, Moorish,…
Emeco American Designer Furniture

Wilton C. Dinges founded the Electric Machine and Equipment Company (Emeco) in 1944 with $300 in savings and a used lathe for machine work. He started bidding on government manufacturing contracts out of a loft in Baltimore, Maryland, beginning with experimental antennas and jet engine parts. Read More →
LaGardo Tackett (1911 – 1992) American Ceramicist

He ran a pottery studio from 1946 to 1954. He taught at Los Angeles’s California School of Design, where he and his students developed outdoor pottery planters, which resulted in establishing the Architectural Pottery in 1950.Read More →
Arthur J. Pulos (1917- 1993) American industrial designer and educator

Arthur Pulos (1917 – 1993) was a well-known design teacher, promoter, and industrial designer. Arthur Pulos was renowned for his writings, lectures in developed and developing nations, and involvement with important organizations like the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID).Read More →
Tucker Viemeister (b.1948) American Product Designer

Tucker Viemeister graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 1966, went to two different colleges. He ended up studying industrial design at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, from which he graduated with a degree in industrial design in 1974. Read More →

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Pio Manzù (1939 – 1969) Italian industrial designer – Encyclopedia of Design
Pio Manzù (1939 – 1969) was an industrial designer from Italy. He designed automobiles, taxis, and tractors for Fiat, lighting and appliances for Olivetti, packaging for Form, Industrial Design, Style Auto, and Interiors, and wrote for Form, Industrial Design, Style Auto, and Interiors. He created the Parentesi lamp, which Achille Castiglioni finished in the late 1970s.

Marc Harrison (1936 – 1998) American Industrial designer – Encyclopedia of Design
Marc Harrison (1936-1998) was an industrial designer from the United States. Harrison sustained a significant brain injury in a sledding accident when he was eleven years old. He had to relearn simple functions like walking and talking as a result of the crash.