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	Silver Palaces from Gibbs Smith, Publisher
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Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 629.226 EAN 9781586853525 ISBN 158685352X Manufacturer Gibbs Smith, Publisher Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 160 Publication Date August 18, 2004 Publisher Gibbs Smith, Publisher UPC 082552023522 Availability Usually ships in 24 hours Product Description Vintage and modern-day photographs and advertisements add depth to Silver Palaces: America's Streamlined Trailers, a must-have book for this fall. It is historically significant for those who suffer from wanderlust, some fulfilled by owning and traveling with a 'silver palace,' or perhaps owning an older model that's been rebuilt and refurbished. With a simple, historical beginning, the streamlined trailer got its start. There were challenges in making mobile spaces for living-could anyone make a self-contained streamlined trailer complete with full hookups? After World War II, housecars and motorhomes were seen everywhere-a result of aluminum becoming available for trailers. Once these silver palaces were on the road, RVs and travel associations became popular . . . and well, the end of the highway was never in sight. Doug Keister has photographed fourteen award-winning, critically acclaimed books. His credits with Gibbs Smith, Publisher, include Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography and Classic Cottages: Simple, Romantic Homes as well as Fernando's Gift (El Regalo de Fernando), a Sierra Club Book for Children. Doug lives in Chico, California. Vintage and modern-day photographs and advertisements add depth to Silver Palaces: America's Streamlined Trailers, a must-have book for this fall. It is historically significant for those who suffer from wanderlust, some fulfilled by owning and traveling with a 'silver palace,' or perhaps owning an older model that's been rebuilt and refurbished. With a simple, historical beginning, the streamlined trailer got its start. There were challenges in making mobile spaces for living-could anyone make a self-contained streamlined trailer complete with full hookups? After World War II, housecars and motorhomes were seen everywhere-a result of aluminum becoming available for trailers. Once these silver palaces were on the road, RVs and travel associations became popular . . . and well, the end of the highway was never in sight. Doug Keister has photographed fourteen award-winning, critically acclaimed books. His credits with Gibbs Smith, Publisher, include Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography and Classic Cottages: Simple, Romantic Homes as well as Fernando's Gift (El Regalo de Fernando), a Sierra Club Book for Children. Doug lives in Chico, California. $24.95 U.S. Travel back in time and experience America's silver masters of the road with vintage trailer expert Douglas Keister as he explains the simple, historical beginning of the streamlined trailer, its evolution, and the state of vintage trailer collection and restoration today. The genesis of the streamlined aluminum trailer lies with William Hawley Bowlus, inventor of the Bowlus Road Chief trailer in 1934. From there, it was a matter of sell-outs, buy-outs, folding in, and adapting features from one company to another. But while Bowlus may have invented the streamlined aluminum trailer, it was Wally Byam's Airstream that has become almost generic for a streamline trailer, just as Scotch for adhesive tape, Kleenex for facial tissues, and Windex for window cleaner. If Airstream is the queen of travel trailers, then the Silver Streak is a sister, Spartan and Boles Aero were its cousins, and the Hunt and Thompson housecars were the mansions of the road. Photographs of all these and more-plus the vintage automobiles that pull them around the country today-will delight and entertain you. Find out how the many challenges in making mobile spaces for living were addressed, how World War II affected trailer production and evolution, and how the RV and travel associations that sprang up around the country influenced the growth of this incredibly American obsession! Includes a foreword on 'Streamlining' by Arrol Gellner, syndicated columnist of Architext. Douglas Keister has photographed twenty-two critically acclaimed books. He also writes and illustrates magazine articles and contributes photographs and essays to dozens of magazines, newspapers, books, calendars, posters and greeting cards worldwide. His most recent books include Classic Cottages, coauthored with Brian Coleman, and Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography. Others of his books include Ready to Roll, Red Tile Style, the Bungalow, and Victorian Glory. He lives in Chico, California, with his wife, Sandy Schweitzer. images only Chico, California-based photographer Douglas Keister has photographed twenty-two award-winning, critically acclaimed books. His seventeen books on architecture include four books on Victorian homes (Daughter's of Painted Ladies, Painted Ladies Revisited, America's Painted Ladies and Victorian Glory); three books on bungalow homes (The Bungalow, Inside the Bungalow and Outside the Bungalow), a book on 1920s whimsical homes (Storybook Style) a book about cemetery art and architecture (Going Out in Style), a book on Spanish architecture, (Red Tile Style), six books on bungalow details and Classic Cottages, that will be published by Gibbs Smith Publisher in the Spring of 2004. Keister photographed and wrote an award winning children's book (Fernando's Gift), has two monographs of his personal work (Black Rock and Driftwood Whimsy), a book on classic travel trailers, (Ready to Roll) and a book on cemetery symbolism, Stories in Stone: The Complete Illustrated Guide to Cemetery Symbolism, that will be published by Gibbs Smith Publisher in the Spring of 2004. His wealth of books on architecture has earned him the title, 'America's most noted photographer of historic architecture.' Foreword by Arrol Gellner, syndicated columnist of Architext Streamlining: Function, Form, Fashion Nowadays we take it for granted that an object's appearance should reflect its function. Yet this is a relatively modern conceit. For the first hundred years following the Industrial Revolution, function and appearance were treated as coexistent yet separate entities. A cookstove's functionality was one thing; its decoration was quite another. Mass-produced products were reflexively embellished with a wide variety of historical motifs having no connection with their purpose. Even a modern object free of historical precedent, such as stationary steam engine, might be decorated with antique motifs, whether Gothic, Renaissance, or Egyptian. A Last Look Back In the late nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement arose largely to decry the application of such arbitrary ornament to mass-produced products. Instead, it espoused a more honest decorative vocabulary growing out of the object's construction-an ideal harking back to the medieval craftsmanship of preindustrial times. A piece of wooden furniture, for example, might express its pegged or dovetailed connections rather than having its structure concealed and overlaid with historical motifs. Architecture was likewise expected to make forthright use of natural materials that did not attempt to imitate other finishes. While the Arts and Crafts movement revolutionized domestic design, it had less impact on industrial design. Ultimately, economic forces, not philosophical ones, would shape the aesthetic of manufactured products. Aesthetics Meets Economics Steam locomotives were among the earliest industrial objects to dispense with applied decoration. Since the 1840s, locomotive builders had lavished their products with pinstriping, brass appliqués, multicolor paint schemes, and other nonessential embellishments. However, a focus on efficiency and profit soon led the nation's railroads to do away with such frivolity. By the 1880s, locomotives had taken on the dark, drab, yet purposeful appearance they would retain until the early 1930s. Early mass-produced automobiles, too, began moving away from applied decoration by the early teens. While the interiors of custom-built touring cars still owed more to an Edwardian parlor than to any mechanical aesthetic-some examples boasted inlaid wood paneling, brocade upholstery, and flower vases-affordable, mass-produced automobiles necessarily became much more spartan. The trend was epitomized by the stark lines of Ford's Model T, which could famously be had in any color as long as it was black. In lieu of superficial decoration, motorcars gradually became more expressive of their engineering. Functional requirements such as engine placement and passenger space dictated their basic form, from which a new and unprecedented aesthetic began to develop. The larger and more powerful engines offered on costlier makes, for example, were reflected in extended hoods and longer wheelbases-attributes that would come to symbolize automotive power and prestige for the next fifty years. Alas, automotive engineers sometimes proved inadequate to the task of designing beautiful shapes based on technical needs alone, as the many stodgy vehicle designs of the early twenties will testify. Consequently, by the middle of the decade, both Ford and General Motors had organized specialized groups to deal specifically with automotive aesthetics. The 1927 LaSalle was among the first mass-produced efforts of these so-called 'stylists.' Inspiration Descends on Wings Around the same time stylists arrived, the technologically salient aircraft industry began to influence industrial designers. Aircraft forms, their designs aided by wind tunnel tests, had steadily become sleeker and more aerodynamic, and these exciting new shapes would soon influence mass-produced products of all kinds. In 1901, the Wright brothers had constructed the first wind tunnel to evaluate the lift of various wing profiles. It was a modest affair, sixteen inches square by about six feet long, but it laid the groundwork for all subsequent aerodynamic testing. In 1917, aircraft pioneer Glenn Curtiss built a much larger, seven-foot-diameter tunnel in Hempstead, New York. That same year, the first mass-produced all-metal airframe design appeared in the guise of the Junkers J.4; portentously, the German fighter was sheathed in Duralumin, an alloy one-third the weight of steel. While wood-and-canvas aircraft designs would linger for decades, the course of modern aviation had already been set. In 1921, the U.S. government completed the first in a succession of wind tunnels at its airfield in Langley, Virginia. The 1920s and early '30s brought continual refinement in aerodynamics, along with the gradual adoption of modern fundamentals such as the cantilevered monoplane wing and stressed-skin construction. In 1933, the Italian Macchi-72 seaplane broke the aircraft speed record with a 423-mile-per-hour run over Lake Garda, aided by its remarkably sleek fuselage. In the United States, the combination of lightweight, all-metal monoplane designs and increasingly sophisticated aerodynamic testing resulted in breathtaking streamlined aircraft such as the twin-engined Douglas Air Liner and the Lockheed Electra. A New Industrial Ideal The fact that such beautiful forms were generated by technical efficiency rather than by some arbitrary aesthetic convinced many industrial designers that streamlining held the key to truly modern forms. By the early 1930s, streamlined aircraft design was already influencing the auto industry. Chrysler Corporation was first to take the streamlining plunge with its Airflow models of 1934, whose unconventional silhouette arose from the discovery that most cars offered less wind resistance when moving backwards. The Airflow's design eschewed the bolt-upright radiator and timidly raked windshield typical of the period, instead emulating the sloping trunk lid and softly-rounded contours found at the rear of most cars. Although the Airflow was probably too radical for the mainstream market-its sales were disappointing-there was no turning back. Within a few years, all American automakers had adopted some form of streamlined styling. In the travel trailer industry, a few hardy pioneers followed suit. The most notable was William Hawley Bowlus, who introduced his ultralight, aircraft-based Road Chief, the forefather of the Airstream and all other 'silver palaces,' in 1934. That story will follow in chapter one. Meanwhile, American railroads once again strove to outdo each other as they had a century earlier, this time with flashy streamlined locomotives styled by high-profile industrial designers. Among these were Raymond Loewy's sleek GG-1 electric locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad, introduced Customers who bought this item also bought Airstream Living Ready to Roll: A Celebration of the Classic American Travel Trailer Mobile Mansions (Intl) : Taking Home Sweet Home on the Road Trailer Travel Airstream: The History of the Land Yacht Customer Reviews for: Silver Palaces Rating - Silver Palaces Having owned different RV's over the years, it's fun to see what was out there and what is still chearished and functioning. It's always a tug at the heart strings to see some of the old ones go away. Rating - An excellent piece This is truly an oustanding book with lovely photography and compact writing. The result is an interesting read with plenty of history coveyed in a complete and interesting way. Rating - Super Book for Vintage Trailer Fans This book is essential for any fan of vintage campers. It has so much more than the story of Airstreams with coverage of many varities, both unique and common. Great photos on every page, with enough text to describe without a lot of needless details. Keister is on target with the vintage trailer hobby. If you are not a trailer collector, you might be after this book. See More Gibbs Smith, Publisher products

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