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| All aboard: Walter and associates working on the famous Klamath |
Walter Landor, the son of prominent German architect Fritz Landauer, was born in Munich on July 9, 1913. Young Walter was greatly influenced by the Bauhaus and Werkbund design movements flourishing in Germany at that time, as well as by his father. At the age of 18, he had already recognized the powerful potential of design to affect human emotion and decided to go into this field to “concentrate on designing everyday products that would make life more pleasant and more beautiful and appeal to the mass audience.”1 Walter left Munich in 1931 and completed his studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Along with Misha Black and Milner Gray, he founded Industrial Design Partnership (IDP) in 1935, the first consultancy of its kind in England. A year later at the age of 23, Walter became the youngest fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.2
Walter and the IDP design team traveled to the United States in 1939 to install part of the British Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. With war rapidly approaching in Europe, Walter decided to travel across the country to study American industrial design. Walter made his way to the West Coast and visited San Francisco, where he immediately decided to settle. “For me, it was a city that looked out on the whole world, a city built on the cultural traditions of East and West.... How could I live anywhere else?”3
