Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows:
Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five.
Something was wrong, according to Raymond Loewy, who admitted that, "with few exceptions, the [competitors'] products were good." He was "disappointed and amazed at their poor physical appearance, their clumsiness, and...their design vulgarity." He found "quality and ugliness combined," and wondered about "such an unholy alliance."
...Loewy was also "shocked by the fact that most preeminent engineers, executive geniuses, and financial titans seemed to live in an aesthetic vacuum," and he believed that he could "add something to the field." But, not surprisingly, the people he approached were "rough, antagonistic, often resentful."
Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that "style consists in distinction of form," and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had "become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs," and he found it "necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand."