
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, October 7, 1993                   TAG: 9310070342
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ROANOKE'S STRUCTURE ONE OF LOEWY'S FINEST

Raymond Loewy, a Frenchman who never lost his accent, was a "premiere industrial designer," said Scott Gardner, a Virginia Tech architecture professor.

His picture was on the cover of Time magazine in 1949, the year he designed the Norfolk and Western Railway passenger station, Gardner said.

Gardner and co-Professor Bill Green researched the station during the past couple of years and learned that it was one of the more outstanding surviving examples of Loewy's work.

Loewy's 1949 update of the station for what was then the Norfolk and Western Railway is featured in a book about him, in which it is identified as a "particularly fine example" of a ticket-office and station building design.

Loewy was born in Paris in 1893. He became a U.S. citizen in 1938. From 1928 to his death in 1986, Loewy and his staff designed many of the country's well-known products, including cars, locomotives, appliances and corporate logos, the interior of Skylab and cutlery for the Concorde airliner.

His mission for the railroad in Roanoke was to modernize its pre-World War II passenger station. Among his changes were the creation of an eight-pillared portico and the use of a plate-glass wall behind it on the street side of the building; interior revisions that included the first escalators in Roanoke, elimination of ticket booths in favor of a ticket counter and addition of body-friendly benches; and construction of the concourse with its viewing wall.

The name of Loewy is tied to many firsts: the GG-1 locomotive for Pennsylvania Railroad Co., on which five bright gold horizontal bands along each side met in a point at the front; the first airline interior, for the Boeing Stratoliner; and later the interior for the Lockheed Constellation.

He was the first designer to put merchandise windows in department stores.

Loewy's first commission was for the Lord & Taylor store on New York's Fifth Avenue. In his book "Never Leave Well Enough for Long," he referred to a department store as a sales machine.

"A whole new world opened up for my design organization the first day we convinced a client that a store was an implement for merchandising and not a building raised around a series of pushcarts," Loewy wrote.

"He didn't just design the Coke bottle," said Gardner. "He liked to talk about the Coke bottle as something `comfortable.' "

by CNB