Charles Butler Associates

Biography of Charles W. Butler

BUTLER, CHARLES WILFRED ( Aug. 1914 - 3 Dec. 1973)
During and just after the second World War Charles worked for the Transportation Division of Raymond Loewy's New York office. He left Loewy's firm after that to begin his independent practice specializing in airline corporate imagery and aircraft interiors for the next twenty-five years until his death. His first practice, based in New York, was the partnership of Butler & Zimmerman from 1948 to 1953, Zimmerman had been the director of the Transportation Department of the Loewy office. They parted ways in 1953 at which time Charles established the firm of Charles Butler Associates. His first jobs at Loewy's office during the war dealt with designing the crew areas of the Martin PBM-5 flying boat and he also was responsible for the interiors of Martin 202 and 404 commercial aircraft at this time. His other work at Loewy was the design of train interiors a big spurt of which took place right after the war.
His first independent airline commission seems to have been as a consultant on the redesign of Northwest Airlines' Boeing "Stratocruisers" in the late 40s, the interiors of which were originally designed by Walter Dorwin Teague in 1945-46. Although the bread and butter of Butler's design practice then was in the field of corporate aviation, creating executive aircraft interiors for clients such as General Motors, King Farouk, and Chiang Kai Shek, he made his real mark on commercial aviation through designing a series of interiors for British-built airliners in the fifties and sixties. The first of these was for Trans Canada Airlines (TCA - now called Air Canada.) when they purchased the Vickers "Viscount" in 1953. TCA hired Butler to "Americanize" the interiors of their new turboprop "Viscounts," and he provided them with squared-off seats that contained the now ubiquitous folding trays, and a new curvilinear cabin with overhead luggage rack of vinyl covered fiberglass that replaced the rather old fashioned netting of the original Vickers hatrack. His introduction of both light colors and warm tones in the interiors, and new materials, particularly plastics, became a trademark of his fifties work as did his efforts to regionalize the palette of airline color schemes, using greens, browns, and reds for northern airlines and blues, aquas and soft greens for southern carriers, blending both sets when airlines had routes in both areas of the country. The success of these Butler-­designed aircraft for TCA prompted Capital Airlines to hire him to do a comparable re­design of their new "Viscounts", the interiors of which used what Butler called "Mt. Vernon Plaid" for some of the fabrics. After his work on the "Viscount," he received the commission from TCA for the interiors of the Vickers "Vanguard" (1957- 60). He was also retained to design the interiors of the new Vickers 800 series "Viscounts" (1957-58) of Continental Airlines. The latter job led him to work on the interiors of ticket offices and the corporate imagery of Continental in the late fifties and early sixties, and he also designed the logo, corporate imagery, and flight attendant uniforms for Canadian Pacific Airlines as they entered the jet age 1960-61 with their new Douglas DC-8s. Moreover, the success of his work on the "Viscount" brought him a number of commissions from British aircraft manufacturers who undoubtedly saw Butler as their ticket to airplane sales in the diverse and lucrative North American market.
Of British jet planes where he created the interior spaces, the most important were the Vickers VC-10 (1958-1962), the BAC 1-11 (1962-63), the Hawker-Siddeley "Trident," (1958-64), and of particular note, the British Aircraft Corporation - Sud "Concorde" Super Sonic Transport (designed 1966+ in service 1976). In this boom time of the late fifties (1958), he established an office in London called Charles Butler Associates Design for Industry Limited which was directed by Robert Price. In the 1960s his New York office grew to a staff of fifteen people under his Vice President Robert J. Price. His last job for the British Aircraft Corporation was the design of the interior of the BAC 3-11 (1968), a large aircraft intended to compete with American jumbo jets and other wide body planes being introduced in the late sixties and early seventies such as the Boeing 747, Lockheed L­1011, and Douglas DC-10. The BAC 3-11 never went into production because of Britain's participation in the establishment of the European consortium Airbus, 1969-70. His last British design effort was the interior of the Hawker Siddeley 146.
Beyond Butler's impact on Britain's aviation industry in the postwar jet age, he also worked on the complete redesign of the Bell OH-4A prototype military helicopter of 1961 into one of the most successful helicopters of our day -- the Bell 206 "Jet Ranger" of 1965. Butler's office planned the machine as if it were an automobile, designing it from the inside out, and using clay models to style the exterior. The result was so popular (well over 8,000 have been built as of 1995) that it probably catalyzed Fairchild-­Hiller to hire Butler's mentor Raymond Loewy in 1967-68 to redesign their OH-5 military helicopter into the civil FH-1 100. Butler's firm continued to receive corporate imagery jobs from airlines, the most notable being the 1970 commission from Trans World Airlines to redesign of the signage and terminal Gate Hold Areas, restaurants etc. at New York's Kennedy Airport as well as similar areas throughout the, at that time, world wide system and complete refurbishment schemes for the interiors of the entire fleet of aircraft. The implementation of this corporate identity program was still under way when Butler died in 1973. His office, under Robert Price, finished this and other jobs before he closed it in 1975.

Compiled by John Zukowsky and edited by Robert Price