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Don Wallance
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Wallance, Don

Author: 
Carroll Gantz
Birth/Death Age: 
1909-1990
Don Wallance

US industrial designer born in Queens who graduated from New York University with a BA and the Design Laboratory (1935-1939). In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) awarded him a prize for a chair he designed for its new building. During WW II he served with the Army Air Corps and researched mass-produced furniture for the Armed Forces. He conducted a study of plywood storage units that won a prize at MoMA's low-cost furniture competition in 1948. He designed the original cantilever seats in Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, which were mounted on horizontal tubular beams instead of legs to make moving and cleaning easier. He is most well-known for his sculptural stainless steel flatware designs for the H.E. Lauffer Company, made by Pott GmbH in Germany, including "Design 1" (1954), "Design Two" (1957), "Bedford" (1963), and "Design Three" (1964). He was the author of the 1956 book, Shaping America's Products, and the founder and chairman of the Croton Visual Environmental Board from 1980 to 1989. He lived in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he died. His archives were donated to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in Manhattan.

Sources: 
100 Years of Design consists of excerpts from a book by Carroll M. Gantz, FIDSA, entitled, Design Chronicles: Significant Mass-produced Designs of the 20th Century, published August 2005 by Schiffer Publications, Ltd.
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