The ’60s are back with AMC’s stylish Emmy Award-winning TV series Mad Men, which casts a searing eye on the men’s-club world of Kennedy-era advertising executives on Madison Avenue. Those were the days, they remind us, when it was cool to chain-smoke (even in bed), quaff martinis with abandon and disparage the female staffers with a blithe sense of entitlement. Particularly stylish is the set design, which plays a strong supporting role onscreen.
Set decorator Amy Wells—together with production designer Dan Bishop—places us in the 1962-era advertising offices of Sterling Cooper with a subtle mix of understated anonymous design elements found on exhaustive tours of L.A.’s used-furniture stores and antique malls. Wells studiously omits furniture by the big names, such as George Nelson, Charles Eames or Eero Saarinen, to avoid a design-statement look, creating instead a low-key sense of the era. “I want to make Mad Men look real, as if the people really have those pieces,” she stated in an interview for Interior Design magazine. “It’s important that they be imperfect, not iconic.” The effect is like the best background music for movies, which you are unaware of during the action—but sounds great when replayed afterward. “Will the Sterling Cooper offices get a design make-over in later episodes?” I asked Wells recently over the phone. “Unlikely,” she replied, amused by the idea, “but if they do, I’ll get the job!” She then added that the charismatic Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) will be making some money down the road, and the odds are good that he will be getting a decorator to redo the house he shares with Betty, his wife (January Jones). This is something to look forward to.
In the early ’60s, while turf wars and secretary trampling were rife at the fictional Sterling Cooper in New York, I was an architectural student in London. There, amongst the fraternity of architects who were also my tutors, American mid-century furniture was de rigueur. Each architect’s household I visited displayed the Eames lounger in pride of place and as many Nelson and Saarinen pieces as they could squeeze into their living rooms, creating an impressive Knoll-showroom effect. This was understandable: British manufactured pieces of the period had a postwar austerity. The materials were poor, and the manufacturing quality very basic. By contrast, as Amy Wells lovingly stated: “You polish up a plain old ’60s tabletop from a used-furniture mall in L.A. and immediately appreciate the sheer quality of the hardwood surface.” No cheap plywood in the good old U.S.A.!
The building where I imagine the fictional Sterling Cooper offices to be located is Lever House on Park Avenue, which I first glimpsed with awe on a student visit in 1963. Designed in the early ’50s by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Lever House was the epitome of mid-century corporate modernism with its delicate green-blue curtain wall system and sculptural composition. Now, after an exquisite SOM restoration in 2003, it compares even more favorably with the oh-so-serious 1958 Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe across the street. First-time tourists of 2009 can’t imagine the impact America had on visitors back in the ’60s, even more so if they arrived at the futuristic TWA terminal by Eero Saarinen. (Shortly after he died, I worked in Saarinen’s New Haven office on extensions to TWA.) This brilliant, lyrical design expressed the excitement and glamour of air travel—an event you actually dressed up for in those days!
In the ’60s, America was a productive country. Everything—trucks, streamliner trains, autos, refrigerators and toasters—was made in the U.S.A., bigger and bolder than anything back home, and they all rolled off the production line with iconic assertiveness. Brash and glamorous, American cars ruled the road; when you did spot an imported car, it looked like a dachshund in a dog park filled with Labradors. New models were introduced each fall; longer, sleeker, wider and more powerful than the previous year’s offerings, and this was the time when everyone who was anyone (including the executives at Sterling Cooper) religiously traded last year’s model for the next new one. This was the American dream, and Madison Avenue made sure you knew all about it.
I remember sitting on a hill above a suburban car dealers’ row on a fall evening during the annual launch weekend and watching the firework displays illuminate all the dealers’ lots. Two auto-obsessed artist friends, Phil Garner and Chip Lord, observed an annual ritual devoted to checking out all the new models on Van Ness Avenue, where the car dealers had their glossy showrooms. (As the art group Ant Farm, they produced the famous roadside sculpture in Amarillo, Texas, burying a tails-up row of Cadillacs from 1957 to 1965—the years they sported tailfins.)
Today is different: Pontiacs have downscaled to Priuses, doughnuts have become croissants, and Labradors have morphed into Labradoodles. Little is quintessentially American anymore as it was in the brave old world of the 1960s. I miss it.
This article was featured in the Spring 2009 Home Observer.
