Oliver Lincoln Lundquist Dies in New York

Architect Oliver Lincoln Lundquist, an industrial designer protégé of Raymond Loewy best known for heading the team that created the United Nations logo, died last week in New York. He was 92.

According to an obituary in The New York Times, Lundquist served as a Navy lieutenant in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War Two, working directly with architect Eero Saarinen to prepare visual presentations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Washington press corps. After the war, Lundquist attended the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations Charter was signed. His team was responsible for designing all the graphics for the conference and an official delegate’s badge, which became the prototype for the United Nations logo.

Lundquist was born in 1916, in Westbury, N.Y., and studied architecture at Columbia University. In 1937, during his senior year, he was hired to work in the Loewy’s prestigious industrial design office and, said the Times, was trained by Loewy himself. At Loewy’s firm, he worked on the Chrysler Motors Exhibition for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, designing a wind tunnel display that used smoke to show the car’s smooth air stream and also creating a “magic talking car” that spoke in the voice of the “Amateur Hour” host Major Bowes about the great autos created by Chrysler. He also installed a “frozen forest” to demonstrate Chrysler’s new air-conditioning system. The forest had palm trees made of steel with refrigerant inside. “This became a favorite refuge inside on the hot summer days,” Lundquist said.

He later became a partner in the New York architectural firms Van Der Lanken & Lundquist and Lundquist & Stonehill. He was an early proponent of track lighting, doing many original designs for the lighting company Lightolier. While he was at the Loewy office, Lundquist designed the blue-and-white Q-Tip box.