Rowena reed kostellow biography

Rowena Reed Kostellow (July 6, 1900 – September 17, 1988) was an American industrial designer and professor.
As a leading educator and designer from the 1930s to 1980s, Rowena Reed Kostellow shaped the global study and practice of industrial design.
Born in Kansas City, MO on July 6, 1900, Rowena received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and later studied sculpture at.

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Rowena Reed Kostellow

American industrial designer

Rowena Reed Kostellow (July 6, 1900 – September 17, 1988) was an American industrial designer and professor. Alongside her husband, Alexander Kostellow, and other designers and artists, she co-founded the first industrial design education course at Pratt Institute.

Early life and education

Rowena Reed was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 6, 1900, as a child of three born to a physician and housewife.^[1] She pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and later studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute.^[2]

Career

After marrying Alexander Kostellow, they moved to New York City where she studied sculpting under the direction of Alexander Archipenko. She spent one year in Europe learning sculpting and painting before returning to North America.^[1] In 1929, the duo moved to Pittsburgh to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,^[3] where they co-founded the institute's first industrial design education course.^[

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Inventing Industrial Design Education

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 very heart of the steel industry and despite the depression that ravaged much of the country, chimneys belched, machines bellowed, business hummed. And there were new currents in the air.

A decade earlier, American industry had begun to turn to specialists in the arts for help in designing and marketing 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 among them. These pioneers were staking out a new field, laying the groundwork for what would become the industrial design profession.

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,

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The Impact of Rowena Reed Kostellow

Culture comes from a number of forces intertwining; these include technological advancement, politics, mass media, and design—and design education. One of the most interesting, yet subtle, historic paths of influence in design can be traced to a single person: Rowena Reed Kostellow. She was the Chair of the Industrial Design department at Pratt after helping to create the first ID program at Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Tech), and she was the driving force behind the study of form. This program taught: Rectilinear volumes, Curvilinear volumes, Rectilinear and Curvilinear, Composition of Fragments, Planar Construction, Lines in Space, Construction, Convexity, Concavity, Abstract Analysis, and Space Design.

She taught these skills to designers like Jay Doblin, who went on to teach at IIT and then form Doblin Group; Marc Harrison, who pioneered Universal Design and taught at RISD; Craig Vogel, who taught at Carnegie Mellon (and who is now the director of the Center for Design Research and Innovation at DAAP in Cincinnati); and Read Viemeister,