'Design Without Frontiers', by Jeremy Myerson, Design Week, 7 April 1989.

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If travel broadens the mind, then Douglas Kelley must have the most all-embracing perspective in British design.

 

Just consider his itinerary over the past 30 years. He is an American who designed factories and training camps in Korea during the Korean War, studied in West Germany at the famous Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, and forged close links with Italian design after marrying an Italian. He has worked successfully as a consultant in New York, Paris and London, completed a United Nations design mission to Egypt, and toured China.

 

Now permanently based in London in a stylish home-cum-studio on Sloane Street which displays many of his own artefacts, Kelley can look back on a long and multi-faceted career in which he has been at various times an architect, ceramicist, furniture innovator, exhibition specialist, product, graphic and interior designer.

 

Who better, then, to be an elder statesman at a time when design is urgently looking to cross national boundaries and integrate different disciplines than this genuine all-rounder and internationalist?

 

Yet if Kelley is a hero in design, he remains an unsung one. Despite such diverse achievements as designing the first NCR high street cash dispenser (which revolutionised the way most of us draw out money from a bank) and the T-chair for Cadsana (which has gone on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art), Kelley has kept a low profile.

 

I suspect this quiet, precise and thoughtful man prefers it that way, but Kelley admits: "You don't become well known when you do so many different things."

 

An unconventional design career started conventionally enough in the late Forties. Kelley, who hails from upstate New York, was "all signed up to study architecture at Syracuse". But an art teacher at his high school suggested that he should consider taking industrial design at Pratt, one of the leading design schools in the US, as an alternative.

 

“At the time my choice was unusual," recalls Kelley, "because the only person articulate in industrial design was Raymond Loewy. But I spent three years at Pratt, which encouraged an intuitive approach."

 

In 1950, Kelley went straight from college into business with two classmates — Ross Littell and William Katavolos. They created a collection called The New Furniture and teamed up with a textile company called Laverne to manufacture it. The range included a three-legged T-Chair (recently revived by Cadsana), which proved an immediate artistic success.

 

"We went straight from Pratt in Brooklyn to Manhattan high society," says Kelley. "Irving Penn photographed the chairs, MOMA selected pieces for its permanent collection, Saarinen specified the furniture for his General Motors technical centre, a great honour at the time."

 

The problem, though, was money. "Laverne took advantage of a group of young designers," explains Kelley. "We never made a penny from royalties until 1988, when Cadsana took up the furniture. Now it is still made in Italy and America."

 

A bitter falling-out with Laverne followed. Writs flew and Kelley subsequently moved across town to work with the legendary George Nelson for a variety of clients including Herman Miller. But not before he and his partners had turned to architecture and created a highly unusual modern home for his parents near Buffalo in upstate New York.

 

"My father was a patent attorney and always fighting for inventions," says Kelley. "This affected my upbringing. When my family wanted to move up-country, they had the faith to allow me to create a steel and glass structure which afforded breathtaking views of the surroundings. Unfortunately the house is no longer in the family and I haven't seen it for 15 years."

 

Looking back now on Kelley's approach to furniture and environments in the early Fifties, it is remarkable how one so young could have developed such enduring work.

 

Beneficiaries during the Fifties were employer George Nelson, who is described by Kelley as "a perceptive critic", and the US government, which drafted Kelley into the Korean War to work alongside Korean engineers on a variety of major projects. "I said I was a designer so they said, 'Okay, you can design factories.' It was an incredible challenge."

 

After the Korean War was over, Kelley "wandered around Japan for six months"  before winning a Fulbright Fellowship to the Ulm Hochschule in West Germany. He'd applied to go there because of the reputation of Max Bill but arrived just as the great man was leaving, ousted in a palace revolution. 

 

Ulm provided a stern counterbalance to Pratt's intuitive emphasis, and Kelley returned to New York a year later to start his own practice. En route he stopped off in Milan, where he met his Italian wife and learned about Italy's post-war golden age of design.

 

Equipped with so many different cultural influences, the late Fifties proved a creative period for Kelley. In particular, he experimented with organic ceramics and with sculptural packaging for Revlon. "I've always believed in organic natural shapes, following Nervi's example rather than the high-tech architectonic approach of recent years" he says.

 

Kelley admits that he might have remained in New York if Raymond Loewy hadn’t invited him to head up the Paris Loewy office in 1960. Loewy's biggest client at the time was British Petroleum and Kelley worked on identity, packaging and service stations for BP. 

 

Paris proved to be very much to Kelley's cosmopolitan tastes. His two daughters became fluent in Italian and French, and the projects he managed, including Hilton Hotel interiors, were often large in both scale and prestige. But in 1966 he decided to go to live and work in London.

 

The opportunity arose when US design firm Lippincott and Margulies decided to move into Europe on the strength of its Chrysler account. Kelley was headhunted to manage the operation and was told to site the office wherever he wanted to go. Kelley chose Grosvenor Street in London. "But it didn't work out," he says. "Lippincott and Margulies were the typical bad Americans who wanted to penetrate Europe with a sledgehammer."

 

After just 18 months, Kelley left to become an independent consultant in London, building up a practice in Jermyn Street which employed up to 15 staff at different times.

 

"London proved a very different city in style to Paris," he says. "The British have a literary heritage rather than a visual one, and I nearly left several times." How then can Kelley explain London's design consultancy boom of the Eighties? "It's been to do with the trader instincts in retail," he claims.

 

If Kelley has scaled down his consultancy activities in the past five years allowing more time for lecturing and UN missions, he was nevertheless in the front line of British design for a decade from the early Seventies onwards. Milestone work included identities for the Bank of Ireland, Chef & Brewer, and Carrington Viyella; exhibitions for Laporte; product design for Elna sewing machines. One Elna model, the Lotus, followed the T-chair into the MOMA collection.

 

But, on reflection, Kelley's most important project of this period must undoubtedly be the NCR self-service cash dispensing unit, pioneering work which has helped to change the role of banks on the high street. Kelley was commissioned by the Dundee-based subsidiary of US company NCR (formerly National Cash Register) in 1978. He recalls: "When we first presented the concept, some top NCR executives were afraid people wouldn't know how to use them. They said, 'You're out of your mind, people will never get out money on the street." But other managers within NCR supported the idea."

 

Kelley designed the unit with great attention to ergonomics to fit into the old safe deposit box space on the exterior of banks. "When you stand in front of it, there's a certain privacy. Now the design has gone throughout the world," he says.

 

The NCR project won a Duke of Edinburgh design award in 1985, but the Design Council chose to give all the design credit to three unknown engineers. Kelley's name was omitted from the roll of honour, and he is still baffled and bitter about the incident to this day. The omission is all the more unforgivable when you consider what an impact the NCR design has had and how little back-slapping the prolific Kelley has enjoyed.

 

Kelley went on to extend the principles of automatic teller machines to an airline ticketing terminal for NCR in 1981-2, but the airline business proved more elusive and the system was not a success.

 

He did, however, collaborate with a notable patron of good design, Olivetti, on the interiors of its Putney headquarters in 1983. "It was a post-war spec building with seven floors," says Kelley. "It was not an easy project."

 

A year later, with NCR no longer a client, Kelley lost the lease on Jermyn Street and decided to change direction once again. He now devotes his time to "doing the things I enjoy doing" — lecturing, travelling, and furniture design.

 

Two recent missions for the United Nations took him back to South Korea, scene of his innovations in the Fifties. And the high-profile Cadsana production of his furniture has also revived interest in his role in that quirky design decade.

 

But Kelley is not nostalgic for the past. Rather, he is always in search of new cultural influences — such as leading a class of Chinese design students through a critique of the bicycle in Shanghai.

 

As I leave, our interview concluded, Douglas Kelley presses a 1960 copy of the US magazine Industrial Design into my hands. A familiar vibrance comes off the pages of this "special international issue" and I realise that there's nothing new under the sun in design publishing. In a sense, there's nothing new under the sun in design practice either. Decades are recycled and national heritages plundered for the creative ammunition they can give us now.

 

Kelley, who has spanned the post-war design years with dignity and not a little courage, stands apart from the crowd.

 

 

Originally published in Design Week 7 April 1989. Reproduced by kind permission of Jeremy Myerson.

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