Sets of the Seventies

I am working on a blog piece for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art blog as a guest blogger, so this is a blog about a blog! Without giving too much away, my entry discusses Vassos’s overall contribution to television design and his involvement with the Advanced Design and Styling Center at RCA which I first learned about from fabulous concept drawings of portable televisions in the most 1960s of settings.  I found  these in a random file in Box 24 of the archive. Piecing together materials I found at the Vassos Archives at Syracuse University and conversations with the late industrial designer and historian Carroll Gantz, I learned that these concept drawings were part of the Design Center, a concept Vassos came up with in 1954 and was led by RCA designer Tucker Madawick at its formation in 1960. The Center engaged in top-secret blue sky thinking for televisions and other electronics of the future, bringing together a team of leading scholars and practitioners including Yale School of Architecture's modernist architect Paul Rudolph to imagine the future of television. Among the concept sketches was this "24 hour secretary" that allowed the busy executive to be constant contact with his secretary when away from the office. As we see in this image, she looked glamorous as she carried it around.  Other designs they created, eight in all, are incredibly prescient about the future portability, accessibility and clarity of design that would come to define our mobile screen technologies now.