Who most influenced Brooks Stevens?
The streamlined style of Stevens’ early work owes a great deal to the work of New York designers who emerged in the 1920s, such as Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Norman Bel Geddes. But he was more consciously influenced by a custom automobile designer from Europe named Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky. Stevens owned a car (made by the Cord Automobile Company of Indiana) that Sakhnoffsky had customized, and traveled to see the count in Chicago in 1934. Impressed to hear that the elder gentleman made over $300 a day for his auto designs, Stevens resolved to enter the field himself. His early car designs were sometimes quite reminiscent of the count’s creations. Ironically, Sakhnoffsky fell on hard times in the 1950s and came to work for Stevens as a staff designer for a short time.
