| THE HISTORY OF FORMICA CORPORATION |
The Sixties: Lifestyle Revolution
Now a fully mature company, Formica Corporation began an intensive product development program in 1960, building a 40,000 square foot Research and Design Center in Evendale, Ohio. Six years later, Formica Corporation built its Sierra Plant outside Sacramento, California, taking advantage of rapid growth in the western United States and becoming a truly national company. In 1969, a Design Center was created to develop new designs, colors and special effects. A year later, production of industrial-grade laminates ceased altogether.
The Company’s focus on design culminated in the 1964 Formica World’s Fair House in Flushing Meadow, Queens, New York. Made entirely of Formica brand laminate, the World’s Fair House celebrated the optimistic spirit of America with an array of decorator colors on every easy-to-clean surface. Designed for carefree living and “durable beauty,” one hundred and sixty-seven regional variations of this ‘House of the Future” were built in the United States.
Unrest was brewing under the veneer of cheerful affluence and the latter years of the Sixties witnessed the tumult of civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, as well as youthful rebellion and Day-Glo psychedelic fantasies. Likewise, the visual world exploded in a swirl of eye-popping color. Formica Corporation responded with a spectrum of vivid colors not unlike the work of graphic designer Milton Glaser or artist Andy Warhol. The 1964 Citation Series, which won an A.I.D. International Design Award, included Grape, Raspberry, Signal Red and Caribbean Blue. To round out the line, Formica Corporation also offered more than 30 wood grains, as well as faux marbles that maintained their popularity through the early 1970’s.
By the end of the Sixties, Formica brand laminates offered virtually endless design possibilities, while laminates’ practical advantages – versatile, inexpensive, easy to fabricate –were popular with fabricators, as well as consumers. As a synthetic material, it also seemed consonant with an emerging fascination with technology and mass media as key element of Pop culture.
The Seventies: Leadership By Design
“Leadership by Design” had long been the Formica Corporation slogan, and in the Seventies, that maxim was formalized with the establishment of the Design Advisory Board. The DAB was a design “think tank” of leading architects and designers who represented a range of design vocabularies – from the heightened elegance of John Saladino to the refined minimalism of Paul D’Urso and the postmodern inclinations of architects William Turnbull, Jr. and Richard Hobbs. Ristimatti Ratia, then the creative director of Marimekko in Finland, became the DAB’s first European member, reflecting the Company’s desire to participate in the international design community.
The Design Advisory Board’s mandate was to encourage Formica management to strengthen its commitment to aesthetics and to guide the company’s product line in a more progressive direction. Its first project was The Color Grid®, a systematic organization of seventy-two laminate colors into neutral and chromatic categories. Formica Corporation adopted the Color Grid as a permanent offering that promised the availability of these colors indefinitely. In the following decade, The Color Grid became Color + Color, which divided color by family and was organized by designer Tibor Kalman.
By the early Seventies, Avocado and Harvest Gold house wares and appliances had arrived and Formica Corporation sales figures echoed the trend. Behind White, White Sequin and Spanish Oak, the Avocado Gossamer and Gold Leather patterns ranked fourth and sixth in sales respectively. Solids in Sliced Avocado, French Blue, Adobe Gold and Bittersweet were also popular choices in the residential market.
While many consumers during the “earth toned” Seventies favored patterns that replicated wood, textiles and marble, the Design Advisory Board was dismayed by the faux side of the company’s product line. Plastic should look like plastic they agreed and soon, the Design Concepts Collection, developed by the French Formica division, was introduced: a high gloss product with geometric designs in contrasting matte finishes that was not in any way imitative. The DAB also urged Formica Corporation to develop a laminate with color all the way through. In response, ColorCore was born.
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