Interior Design's Larry Weinberg has dug up an interesting article by Alexander Kostellow from a 1952 issue of Interiors. Kostellow was then the head of Pratt Institute's ID department, and in the article he shares images of student projects from Pratt's Experimental Design Laboratory. As Weinberg explains,
Pratt's Industrial Design Department took a broadly humanistic approach to training future designers, one that sought to develop creative potential, but one that ultimately centered around machine techniques, hands-on experience, and constant experimentation.The Experimental Design Laboratory...collaborated with [prominent] companies [and] by the fourth (and final) year of study, students were working on actual, real-world problems.
Shown above are a kitchen unit and various pieces of furniture. We share Weinberg's sentiments that works like these would make a fantastic exhibit, and we'd like to add our own idea: Most of the models have surely been lost or disposed of in the past six decades, but wouldn't it be cool if current volunteers were tasked with duplicating the models, full-sized? You'd think with today's CAD and manufacturing advances, it'd be a snap....