Makes You Think

As a contractor that deals with designers and architects as part of day to day dealings I found this an interesting article as a fan of function and simplicity over form and aesthetics and using resources to their fullest. From the WSJ's Taste page:

Inspiration in an Era of Crisis

The architects and designers who helped win World War II.

BY JOEL HENNING

Tuesday, August 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

CHICAGO--"What did you do in the war, Daddy?" was the classic refrain of baby boomers, referring to their fathers' roles during World War II. Today, few of us have yet heard much about the part played by architects and industrial designers in the 1940s, either in the war effort or in the peacetime activity that immediately followed. "1945: Creativity and Crisis, Chicago Architecture and Design of the World War II Era" is the Art Institute of Chicago's worthy effort to fill this gap, showing how designers participated in the transformation of America into a giant factory producing war matériel and then adapted wartime techniques to deal with design challenges during the postwar boom in consumerism, housing and transportation.