The Lost Studio of Atlantis: Norman Bel Geddes's Failed Revolution in Television Form
2012; University of Texas Press; Volume: 70; Linguagem: Inglês
10.7560/vlt7002
ISSN1542-4251
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
Resumohrough the 1940s and 1950s, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes helped to modernize myriad industries such as automobiles, frozen food, Broadway, and cinema. He never realized his ambitious designs to revolutionize television, the defining media industry of the 1950s. Employed as an NBC consultant between 1951 and 1956, Bel Geddes designed three studio prototypes: Atlantis, the Pilot Studio, and the Horizontal Studio. The scale of these facilities was monumental, particularly for downtown Manhattan, where the first two studios would be built. Atlantis would house the fourteen largest theaters in America, while the Pilot Studio would approach the size of Madison Square Garden (Bel Geddes, Atlantis 4, Pilot 43). While Bel Geddes developed his top secret Atlantis studio for NBC, CBS began promoting its own new studio: Television City, completed in 1953 in Los Angeles. As Lynn Spigel details in TV by Design, CBS and its architect, Charles Luckman, emphasized modern innovation (121–25), but the actual facilities paled in comparison to Bel Geddes’s designs. NBC executives found the CBS studio quite conventional, lacking nearly all of the ideas expressed in Luckman’s interviews (Bel Geddes, letter to George Gruskin, 26 May 1952). Bel Geddes referred to it as “just short of a joke” (report of meeting, 3 July 1952). If Television City provided a better space for existing production techniques, Bel Geddes’s proposals endeavored to overhaul the entire process and spatial configuration of the television industry. By basing The Lost Studio of Atlantis: Norman Bel Geddes’s Failed
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