page_title: John Vassos
section_title: Industrial design
hierarchical_section_title: John Vassos / Industrial design
caption_attribution_description: English: Television, RCA Victor TRK 12, 1939, Wolfsonian-FIU Museum
context_page_description: John Vassos whose career as an American industrial designer and artist helped define the shape of radio, television, broadcasting equipment, and computers for the Radio Corporation of America for almost four decades. He is best known for both his art deco illustrated books and iconic turnstile for the Perey company, as well as modern radios, broadcast equipment, and televisions for RCA. He was a founder of the Industrial Designers Society of America, in 1965, serving as its first chairman simultaneously with Henry Dreyfuss as its president. Vassos' design philosophy was to make products that were functional for the user.
  A decorated veteran of World War II, Vassos was chief of the OSS "Spy School" in Cairo, Egypt from 1942-1945.
context_section_description: In 1924, Vassos created his first industrial design product, a lotion bottle popular as a hip flask during Prohibition. In 1933 he designed the widely popular Perey turnstile still used in many subway stations. Other notable designs included a streamlined paring knife, Hohner accordions and harmonicas, computers, an electron microscope for the RCA company, corporate logos, and Remington shotguns. These highly functional and visually striking designs include major forms of media in the 20th century. His strengths in designing media tools for consumers and professionals alike set him apart from other industrial designers. Vassos designed numerous radios, phonograph players, the Constellation jukebox for the Mills Company, and total environments for movie theaters, international expositions, and restaurants. John Vassos's contributions to public projects, like the famous RCA Building for the 1939/1940 New York World's Fair, have been overlooked for decades. John Vassos considered RCA, NBC, United Artists, Waterman Pens, Coca-Cola, Wallace Silver, Nedick's, Mills Industries, and the United States Government among its scores of national clients.
  Vassos designed the cabinets of the RCA Corporation's first commercially available television sets. For the 1939 New York World's Fair he created a novel TV cabinet in transparent Lucite plastic as well as the company's first mass-produced television sets – the TRK12, TRK-9, and TRK-5. These sets were sold at major department stores in the New York metropolitan area. The TRK-12 is noted as one of the most significant mass-produced designs of the 20th century and held in many major museum collections including the Smithsonian.
  Vassos also created envisioned the interior spaces for television.  His "Musicorner" for America at Home Pavilion or "Living Room of the Future" as it was known was displayed 1939/1940 New York World's Fair, and was among the designer led creation of an integrated media-centered room which combined radio, television, and record player housed within a single cabinet.
  In 1941, Vassos designed the RCA 621TS television set, which was slated to be sold the following year as a 1942 model.  However, after Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II, manufacture of most consumer goods (including radio and television sets) was prohibited for the duration of the war, so the design was withheld until the end of the war, when it was brought out in 1946 as a limited run model until the post-war designs were fully ready.   His industrial design contributions at RCA spanned over 40 years and included the designs for microphones, broadcast equipment, transmitter buildings, RCA's first color television camera which became the standard in the field, and the RCA 501 solid-state computer among many other hundreds of products for the company.
  In the post war years, he designed pavilions for U.S. Trade Fairs (Karachi, New Delhi), for RCA at the Brussel's World's Fair and the 1964 New York World's Fair, modernized movie theaters for the United Artists Company including Grauman's Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, export radios, radar equipment, televisions cameras, and boom stands for RCA, and designed shotguns for Remington Arms among other jobs. In 1960, he created an "advance design center" or think tank for RCA bringing together architects and designers like Paul Rudolph and Melanie Kahane to envision portable computers and television screens, a visionary proposition when computers were only used for businesses.
  Record players and microphones he designed can sell for thousands of dollars each at auction. His portable aluminum record players, the RCA Victor Special, are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many other collections, regarded as iconic of modernistic design. Like many of Vassos' designs of media technologies, they are devoid of direct references to streamlined vehicles and inspired by the spare aesthetics of the Bauhaus School. His papers are collected at Syracus
caption: John Vassos designed RCA Victor TRK12 TV, first mass marketed TV by RCA, premiered at the 1939 New York World's Fair
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