Simon Davidson’s Bonneville series is a set of super-contrasty, blown-out images from Speed Week.  He’s got a fantastic eye for composition and color placement.

On a completely different note is Laurent Nivalle, whose 2010 series on the Le Mans Classic is a stunning mix of shallow depth-of-field shots of race cars of different eras brought together at the world’s most important race track. Nivalle is the art director and photographer for Citroen Design.

Although shot digitally (5DII, I read somewhere), the post-processing gives the images just enough of a film-y feel, especially in the B&W series.

Stuff like this has me wishing I could just spend the rest of my life traveling the world with my cameras. [sigh]

Beni Bischof, an artist based in Switzerland, created the series Handicapped Cars in 2008/9. I’d seen a couple of the images on various sites over the years, but always without attribution or background.

But, handicapped? I’m not so sure.  Every one of these things is something I want in my life.

And, while I’m still pretty much backgroundless, at least now I have some more context in the form of his other works– lots of subversive remixing. Like bricked up castles, and hilariously punctured portraits.

See for yourself here.

And can someone tell me where to find a HoverCharger?  I really want one.

First you released this sketch:

Apparently reality was too difficult.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great ideas here. Both functional and aesthetic. And I like it– I just wish I were able to like it more.

It’s hard not to be disappointed by the promise of the sketch and the actual embodiment of it. This could have been so much better.

Based in Barcelona, the gallery is currently featuring Markus Haub’s Racing Legends collection.

Markus Haub was a designer at VW’s Design Center Europe for 11 years, and apparently decided to stay in Barcelona when VW moved the studio to Potsdam. He also features a beautiful series of paintings of cityscapes on his website:

But my favorites will probably remain the 917s.

After having tackled the Jeep CJ and Toyota FJ, their latest take is the late-60s Ford Bronco. Their break-even goal was five initial examples.

They sold all five in less than 72 hours.

The thing about the whole endeavour that pulls my designer’s heartstrings is the same thing that one of the cars that got me interested in car design in the first place did: they built it to be as good as it can possibly be.

I can’t write anything that hasn’t been written about the McLaren F1, except that what really struck me about it wasn’t the shape, the speed, or the million-dollar price tag. It was how Gordon Murray described the process of conceiving it, setting out with the intention of building the most-perfect car. Using the best technologies available. The best materials for the job. Build something that is meant to last longer than you.  Even going so far as to use gold foil in the engine bay, because it shields heat better than any other material. Heck, if NASA used it, it probably worked.

ICON’s design development of the Bronco is chronicled HERE.  They worked with ten mathmeticians, engineers, and fabricators from Nike’s Kitchen (R&D center), and Camilo Pardo, making the Bronco the best it could possibly be.

I love it.

Top Gear did a fitting tribute to Saab’s demise, complete with VHS footage, Clarkson’s huge hair, and music they apologized for.

The Ur-Saab was very much a product of its time, and somehow, always a favorite. Designed by people who’d never designed a car before, and who wanted to do it better: more aerodynamic, safer, and affordable than anyone else in post-war Europe.

 Sixten Sason drove Saab’s design through the 60s  (along with other iconic brands like Hasselblad and Electrolux), emphasizing aerodynamics and structural innovation. Saab’s history includes many engineering and design firsts, although sales numbers were never on the scale of the Big Three. It took thirty years to reach a million production cars.

While they’re very much like Porsche, in that their most-recognized design (the 99) became the style icon that would evolve for decades (along with making TURBO a household word in the 80s), they actually produced a few two-seat sports cars along the way. The Sonnet won out over Sason’s Catharina concept, but Catharina included lots of design elements that would be seen on the 99 and almost all Saabs to come.

It’s a real shame, what GM turned them into.

Between sad Subaru and GMC mashups and really poor platforms, they starved a company rooted in innovation and individuality to death.

Let’s file that one under: lessons in mismanagement.

In May 1998, in a bookstore in Maryland, the day before a 128-mile bike ride, I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  Which was, as it turned out, a pretty big deal for me.

What does this have to do with car design?

Well, this.

I had already decided that car design was where I was going. There’s a moment, on page 461, where DFW describes a “1964 Ford Aventura.”   A car ‘with a periscopic hood scoop, an engine that sounded more like a jet than a piston engine’, and  ‘such a wicked nice multilayer paint job that its black had the quality of water at night.’  I didn’t know what that car was, but, somehow, I did.

Now, of course, you’re saying that there was no such car. Well, yeah. There was a lot of imaginative embellishment on his part.  But, in a way, there was an Aventura.

This takes us back to the early 60s, with Lee Iaccoca as president, Gene Bordinat in charge of design, and the first “personal car” on the market, and the best-selling design ever.

This was one of the cars that presaged the Mustang:

Dreamy.

From X-cars:

Out of the Aventurra and Mustang I projects, which appear to have been warm-ups for the later Ford Division project, the Ford X-Cars were the answer to the Division’s goal of producing visually exciting, if mechanically prosaic, concept cars. The Allegro — the first of the second-generation X-Cars, fashioned in late 1962 — was based upon the earlier DeLaRossa Aventurra design and built on a Falcon unibody.

The Design Center’s staff had undergone several changes, and by then was headed by Don DeLaRossa and Joe Oros, and supervised by Ford chief stylist and Vice-President Eugene Bordinat. Assistant designers John Mahiar and Jim Sipple designed a two-passenger sports coupe under the general project banner of Aventurra. This effort was underway alongside the Ford T-5 program, which would eventually lead to the production Mustang. In fact, the threads of the Aventurra and the T-5 projects often became intertwined to the point that clear distinctions were difficult to make. Bordinat liked the designs but Lee Iacocca thought that it was out of place in Ford’s marketing scheme because he believed there was no market for a two-seater. For a similar reason, the Budd Body Company’s design project, the XT Bird (which was little more than a deconstructionist take on the two-seater 1956 Thunderbird mounted to a Falcon unibody and stripped of the fins) was rejected as an unacceptable styling redux. Despite the negative response to the XT Bird, the Aventurra project continued apace.

The first Mustang was actually more like the first Fiero;  mid-mounted, transverse V4.

Driven by Dan Gurney at its public introduction.

And Cobra might be next.

“I wanted to get below the surface and demythologize the process.”

-Bill Porter, on the touring show he helped curate and oraganize, called Designing an Icon, Creativity and the American Automobile.

Unfortunately I found out about this show after the fact. I wish I had had a chance to see it.

The following is from an interview published in the 1989 book The Art of American Car Design: the Profession and the Personalities:

‘Car designers are almost always car crazy, in a positive sense, but very few who reach the top have any awareness of the other arts. Not only is Porter aware of the history of modern design and of the place of cars in it, but he also talks about his designs with the vocabulary usually reserved for painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Porter: My recipe for great design involves the blending of engineering and aesthetics.  Automobiles are complicated–it takes a long time and lots of individuals to design one.  In this context, the creative process, if it is truly creative, is an evolutionary journey where the designer’s initial inspiration undergoes a development process to its final fruition.

The trick is to retain the spark of that initial inspiration in the final product.  In the end, one hopes to get in a few good licks and beat the averages.

He searches for added visual complexity, having discovered during the sixties “a richer vocabulary’ based on subtly changing conic sections. Especially important to him are the aesthetics of visual transition, and he researches “evolving” form, correspondence, analogy, discontinuity, and particularly curve life (which he calls “spring”) within changing shapes. He also looks for suggestive metaphors and harmonies in those visual intricacies. Porter is a man whose vocabulary is dominated by two words: For him, the conscious search for the “exquisite” should produce the hidden satisfaction of the “subliminal.”  Ask him to explain what he is driving at with a form, and he responds with a metaphor expressing the unconscious “imaging” he hopes to achieve.’

Bill Porter was an important influence in my car design education, even though I didn’t know it then. His name came up fairly frequently in my first two years at CCS, in the context of instructive examples that we frantic students could not possibly have appreciated at that point. What he was working toward is completely irrelevant now, in terms of style and form, but totally relevant when it comes to process and understanding.

From here, now, I get it. And, actually, what I want to do with this post is mythologize, a little bit. The process, the art that lies behind every design on the road; I can promise that it’s totally esoteric, and probably a fun read.

I think this is about how the tools you use to envision something has everything to do with what the product becomes.

Up to the 1950s, colored pencils and airbrushes ruled in the design world.  Most often on a colored paper– white on black was very common through the early post-war years. Here’s a sketch from Bill Mitchell (who succeeded Harley Earl as GM’s design VP), which typifies the technique:

A sketch by Virgil Exner- very much a product of its time, both in its Deco style, and technique.

Airbrushing really came into favor in the ’50s– a great way to depict the long, sweeping bodyside sections in full-size renderings.  And color! Finally, color. Life imitating art, and vice vesa.

Airbrush, guache, and lots of masking– all the right tools for depicting big radii and tight, shiny details. Which is, of course, what the ’50s were all about.

Pencil on newsprint was a cost-efficient way of drawing (and still is), and some of those studio drawings survive today, even though they’re on a very impermanent medium.

In the 1960s, markers and vellum become the standard, along with a complete shift in car design– the pontoon and streamlined fenders are replaced with long, slabbed bodysides, a complete composition from headlight to taillight. Inseperable from that unification of form came the understanding that, with automotive finishes being what they were, the forms of the cars dictated how they looked moving through light and shadow– and the best shapes were the ones that managed and dictated the reflections as much as the underlying shape. Markers, pastel, and vellum helped designers illustrate these effects, bringing a glassy, liquid look to both the renderings and the final product.

Here’s a Bill Porter sketch:

And one from Kip Wasenko (later to head the Cadillac studio) of GM’s rotary engine studies:

and an absolutely beautiful Firebird sketch from someone whose name I can’t decipher. If they could actually have translated this into a production model (minus the gaudy radiator nonsense), it would have been one of the all-time classics. Perspective off by a few mils? Check. Weak stance? Check. (blame the product planners)

Right idea?

Check.

The late-70s-early-80s brought new challenges for car design, both internal and external. Oil crisis and this:

showed Detroit everything that was wrong with what they were doing, inside and out.

Aerodynamics became the buzzword throughout the industry, highlighted by the Ford Taurus and Audi 100. Ford’s  series of Probe concept cars brought the coeffient of drag down to .137– an absolutely stunning technical achievement, less than half the drag of a current ‘efficient’ production car.

While designers put pen to paper they described things like this:

Now we live digital.

And, like all techniques, it had an awkward inception.

Pontiac’s 1999 GTO Concept pretty much embodies this method. Dean’s Garage covers it as well as anyone can.   It was a proof-of-concept that proved the method, but not the shape, somehow. Too much was missing; there was an obvious lack of love. The numbers may have been right, but nothing else was.

Obviously, things have improved since then, but it proves the point that if the love for and behind an idea doesn’t carry through to the experience of living with it, it’s probably not worth it, and it doesn’t matter how it was rendered. We designers have the tools to make whatever we can imagine possible, and our job is to make the world expect what what will be, before it becomes reality.

One recently-published sketch seems to sum it all up pretty well:

Here’s an amazing collection of car ads.

Worth the look.

Yeah, him.  Chris Bangle.

Vilified, and…. well, pretty much vilified.

But mostly when you read the comments in forums. I’m sure BMW’s board of directors thinks much differently.

For me, his work was a driving, defining sense of hope.

Watch this.

 

“What I believe we’re doing is something that’s created out of our emotions, and, if we can stay with that that in our designs, so that somehow, somehow you know that that person cares about that,

…that first experience.”

In a pre-constantly-connected world, the printed articles that I’d read always turned into a verbal fight between old and new, with neither side recognizing which was the right way to go.

And, worse, neither saw that the right answer is: yes. 

It’s about past and future, not past vs. future.

“The world is about creating.”

Much of the criticism around that time (late 90s-early 2000s) came from things like the X-Coupe concept which, in its slashed surfaces and asymmetry, was derided as “disharmonious.” And of course:  it was, in some ways. And that was a good thing.  This truckish concept effectively previewed the Z4, which came three years later. Much the same way that 1999′s Gran Turismo concept previewed both the upcoming 6 and 7 series cars.  And let’s not forget GINA, which was begun in 2000-2001, but wasn’t made public until 2008. And that disharmony, that disruption, was in fact the whole point– shake up conventional thoughts about what cars and personal transportation should be. If it takes some funky surfacing to start that conversation, then so be it. Gotta start somewhere.

For you students out there, Chris Bangle Design Associates is running a contest, based on a three-part story that he’s written, and the deadline is 30 March. Can’t wait to see what comes of it.

Love or hate his aethetic desicions, you can’t argue with the numbers. He did his job very, very well. While I’m in no way a huge fan of everything that came out of the Bangle era at BMW, he’s always been a source of inspiration and challenge.

This article from 2008 pretty much sums it up.