car design thread

Absolutely, no reason an electric motor can’t be ‘on display’. Just didn’t know if there is interest in it.

 

Even the NYT is weighing in on the Style/Design Exhibit at the DIA.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/business/dia-car-exhibit-detroit.html?fbclid=IwAR3iHUZQMwk_RH14JP_ji-iBLXmL8Kc-m2deAINorlEtYqMuA5cOOWmFWr0
WHEELS

‘A Love Letter to Detroit,’ on Vellum and Chrome
An exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts highlights the relationship of art and car culture over the past 70 years.




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A Corvette Stingray Racer at the Detroit Institute of Arts in its new exhibition "Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020."Credit...Nick Hagen for The New York Times
By Norman Mayersohn

• Nov. 26, 2020

Of the myriad treasures that might draw a sightseeing car lover to Detroit, one potential attraction is notably missing: a major public museum collection dedicated to the automobile. America’s Motor City offers many compelling reasons for a visit, but it really has nothing like the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the LeMay in Tacoma, Wash., or the well-known car displays in Reno, Indianapolis or Philadelphia.

A measure of relief from that drought has arrived in the form of “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020,” an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts that opened this month and runs through next June. A dozen autos, including production models and conceptual show cars, will be displayed alongside drawings and photographs from the design studios where the vehicles took shape. Paintings and sculptures intended to illuminate the relationship of art and car culture over the past 70 years will also be on display.

Despite the location of its stately Beaux-Arts home on Woodward Avenue, a major artery of all things automotive in Detroit, the D.I.A. is not a vault of local industry. The last major exhibition of cars within the museum’s walls was a design retrospective in the 1980s that spanned the era from 1925 to 1950.

River Rouge factory some 15 minutes west of the D.I.A. Still, the museum, established in 1885, is a world-class art institution in the broadest sense, with diverse holdings of international artworks. Typical of American art museums — the Museum of Modern Art in New York is an outlier in this respect — the D.I.A.’s permanent collection does not include cars.

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The exhibition was originally to open as part of a larger celebration of the city’s bootstrap revival, timed to complement the shift of the 2020 North American International Auto Show from its bleak January calendar slot to the more agreeable weather of June. That plan was scuttled when the coronavirus pandemic took hold and the city’s main convention center was converted into a field hospital. The auto show has since been rescheduled for early fall 2021, which will make outdoor displays and activities feasible.

The cars in the “Detroit Style” show include both models once commonplace on suburban streets — a 1967 Ford Mustang and a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda among them — and design studies produced by Detroit automakers as trial balloons, created to focus-group proposed trends at public auto shows. The studies include icons like the 1951 Le Sabre from General Motors and the 1987 Lamborghini Portofino by Chrysler’s studio. The cars were chosen by an advisory committee that represented the College for Creative Studies design school, the Henry Ford museum and Detroit automakers.

Preparation for this show began five years ago, according to Benjamin W. Colman, the D.I.A.’s associate curator for American art. Part of that time was spent choosing the cars, researching the history and working out the logistics of arranging the loans. There was also the matter of where in the museum’s galleries the exhibition would go, partly affected by renovation work and partly restricted by access for the vehicles.






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An Oldsmobile Tornado and above, a photo reproduction of David North’s Flame Red car proposal from the General Motors Design Archive.Credit...Nick Hagen for The New York Time
“These are the largest objects I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Colman said.

The idea of portraying automobiles as both reflective of their eras and as trendsetters for industrial design is hardly new. To take that a step further, the D.I.A. exhibition set out to communicate the journey that started with a designer’s vision. “We wanted to tell the story that runs from image to object, the path it took,” Mr. Colman said.

The proximity of design sketches to actual cars in the museum gallery helps make that connection. For instance, the ’70 Barracuda is seen not only as a production model on display but also in a development sketch, rendered in Prismacolor on vellum in 1967 by Milton Antonick, a Chrysler designer. Mr. Colman describes this image of the car’s tail end as “a humble drawing, an informal working document” that serves to bridge the gap between a styling concept and the final product made of sheet metal.


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Among the more pleasant tasks of assembling such an ambitious exhibition was locating the design drawings.


The support from hometown automakers proved valuable not only to organizing the show, but acquiring display cars as well. The ’67 Mustang belongs to Moray Callum, vice president for design at Ford Motor, whose generosity means he won’t be able to drive the car for the months it’s at the D.I.A. Mr. Callum is comfortable with the sacrifice, though.

“It’s important to show the full-scale objects, to bring the conceptual to life,” Mr. Callum said. “That’s our job every day, and these cars represent what I think has been a higher level of optimism in America. The world is changing, and we might be highlighting the end of an era, the moment just before the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.”

Relevant works by prominent figures from the fine art world, including Charles Sheeler, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are seen in the show, too. Were there any carmakers not in the final selections for the exhibition that should have been represented?




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Benjamin Colman, the curator of the exhibition, standing next to a Corvette Stingray Racer and Ed Ruscha’s "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas."Credit...Nick Hagen for The New York Times; Ed Ruscha, Hood Museum of Art
“Packard, even at the end of its existence, was deserving, and certainly Studebaker could have earned a spot,” Mr. Callum said.

In the view of Mr. Colman, the curator, the goal of presenting cars that reflect the challenges of their times and their outsize influence on culture was paramount. In particular, he points to the 1959 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray racecar concept, a secretive project inside General Motors that established the design language of coming production models and gave rise to a durable mythology about designers and motorsports.

“I hope we tell a story that’s a love letter to Detroit,” Mr. Colman said. Still, the experience of creating this ode to the city’s legacy has not made great changes to his personal transportation: He commutes to work by bicycle.

 

From Autocar
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Hello, welcome to this week’s Subscriber Extra, where I might need to admit to an error. Recently, I said in my column that the BMW iX’s designers clearly meant the new electric SUV to look challenging, dissonant and – let’s say it – ugly.

Well, have a look at this early design sketch for it, where it doesn’t look quite so bad. In fact, I might go as far as to say that it looks really rather good. Muscular and aggressive, it all hangs together quite well.

We could have a debate about whether cars really should need to look muscular and angry to look good. It’s eminently possible, as Volvo and Jaguar and others show, to make desirable cars without them being ever more in-your-face. But I suppose the angst is all very 2020.

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But what I really want to discuss is why these early design sketches so often turn into something else once they reach the metal, as the iX seems to have done. Why they end up so diluted or skewed from the original idea. It happens so frequently that I sometimes wonder why manufacturers release the early drawings at all. I thought the iX was deliberately challenging but what if it was just a result of committees and disputes about what could be done and what couldn’t, and this is where they ended up, like an automotive Monkey Christ.

I’ve heard designers – notably Ian Callum, formerly of Jaguar, and Renault’s Laurens van den Acker – talk about the way their designs come through to fruition. I think I remember Callum getting quite animated about the roofline of the XF, and about his insistence that it was just a couple of millimetres lower than some engineers told him it could be. Perhaps, at BMW, it doesn’t work out like that, and the idea for what looked like a Dakar-inspired off-road coupé was allowed to morph into something with a droopier nose and big windows – because practicality.
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If designs do get hugely diluted – and BMW and the iX aren’t alone in this – who’s to blame and how do you stop it? By setting a more realistic set of parameters on designers at the early stages? Or by giving them more power during a car’s creation?

You get arguments in all product design businesses, I guess, where what looks great in an initial sketch ends up not looking half as good once it’s been through the mill. But maybe, just maybe, companies should let the designers win them more often.

Thanks as ever for subscribing – a few bumper issues coming up.

Matt Prior
Editor-at-large

 

I'm just as guilty as the next designer as to cheating wheel clearance & size. But it has to be done within reason IMO.

 

What a fascinating design. However, I have to admit, i'm not a fan. Displaying all the 'underwear' just doesn't do it for me.
Having been involved with motorcycle design off & on for 40 yrs, my preferences are with fairings. I don't need to see all the oily bits. I do recognize that some do indeed like seeing all the hardware.
The sketches shown are not mine, but they represent my design philosophy. I'll have to scan the sketches the team did for a Cadillac bike proposal. Very cool stuff. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

And a few more.
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https://formfunctionart.com/concept-car/?fbclid=IwAR0iXdr2fNF6Wt3lSlVVG_3bCO6gX6fAB-InqI9ccpTtFdiFpBgQKeUtV1g

The Mid-Century Concept Car and the Lost Art of Formal Craftsmanship
September 3, 2019ERIC MOORE

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Concept cars are about dreaming big and discovering what’s possible in the automobile world. However, current car manufacturers are creating concept cars that are all about speed and environmental friendliness while using computer technology. Conversely, automobile design in the mid-century was all about designing a grand, space-age futuristic vehicle with the artist’s personal skill and style.

Using pencil and gouache, these stylists brought their visions to life. Every nuance and expression of the artist was captured, imagining automobiles into high-tech transportation devices or into sleek, modern sports cars. Despite the original intent of the automobile being simply to transport people, some people saw them as much more.

The Birth of the Concept Car
Although the first automobiles were an engineering marvel, they were not exactly eye-catching. Henry Ford was more concerned with having their success based on “engineering prowess,” not necessarily their visual appeal.

But after the devastating impact of the Great Depression, on both the economy and the outlook of Americans, one car designer decided to use his Hollywood rootsto bring style and excitement to the world of automobiles.

Harley Earl began his career customizing cars for Hollywood stars in his father’s automobile shop. After joining General Motors in 1927, he began the first dedicated design department for an automaker.

Earl’s goal was to provide sleek, unified designs for automobiles. “Earl wanted smooth, flowing lines, with exterior parts ‘built-in’ to the design, blending with the whole,” noted historian Peter Grist.

Realizing the potential for poor designs and ideas to tarnish the great name of General Motors, Earl proposed the idea of the concept car. Instead of producing cars that might be too radical, only one would be produced as a concept car, saving the company money and potential bad publicity.

Although this idea was born before WWII, concept cars didn’t really take off until afterward. And when they did, they really made an impression.

Cars of the Future
After seeing the sleek, sporty cars of Europe, GIs returning from WWII had a major impact on the design of American automobiles. Americans were eager to see more exciting car designs from manufacturers. Some concept cars were updated versions of classics, and some were more cutting edge.

Beginning in 1948 with William B. Stout’s fiberglass “car of the future,” automobile designs became more futuristic. Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti concept had a unique, streamlined look.

In the 1950’s, concept cars were either “out of this world” or made for people who spent a lot of time in their cars. The Lincoln Futura (modified to be the Batmobile for the 1966 TV series Batman) and Ford Mystere are two of the most recognized concept cars of this time. Their fins and plastic domes gave the impression of driving a rocket down the street. Another well-known concept car is the Chevrolet Bel-Air, seemingly made for enjoying double-features at the drive-in.

What Makes These So Timeless?
Even though many of these car design sketches were never realized at the production level, they still hold some magic in their pen strokes. These cars were designed with “naïve optimism”, when worries of foreign competition, oil shortages, and environmental regulations didn’t exist. Even more, these are “[works] of art that not only [contain] the height of skill and formal craftsmanship, but also [are combined] with cultural and historical significance,” says Christopher W. Mount. He also says, “the art of drawing by hand has all but disappeared in many of the design professions,” and “these drawings importantly signify a time when artistic skill and expression met beautifully and significantly with America’s most important and defining industry, the automotive industry.”

Add Automotive and Architectural Pieces to Your Collection
Interested in an original “concept car” design? Look no further than right HERE. If you are looking for the perfect mid-century modern piece to begin, or add to, your own art collection, visit our GALLERY. We have beautiful, original pieces by Raymond Loewy, Vincent Raney, and many others.

Automotive Illustrations

 

Published 27 November 2020
By Will Dron
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MCLAREN P1 DESIGNER NAMES 8 MOST BEAUTIFUL CARS FOR UNDER £5,000
Some obvious modern classic cars, some picked from leftfield


IF YOU’RE looking for one of the world’s most beautiful cars for under £5,000, there’s probably no-one better to turn to than Frank Stephenson, the man who designed the McLaren P1 hybrid hypercar (reviewed here by Jeremy Clarkson) and Maserati MC-12, as well as two more affordable modern motoring icons, the re-imagined Mini and Fiat 500.

Handily, Stephenson – who is now a freelance design consultant – has created a video for his YouTube channel that focuses on exactly that: affordable cars with beautiful designs.


It’s his opinion, of course – you may not agree entirely – but there’s no denying he’s picked some real head-turners. Some are still quite common on the roads but given Stephenson’s keen eye, it’s fairly likely they will become sought-after modern classics, as the numbers dwindle, and it’s clear he thinks these are cars you should snap up now, before someone else does.

Even better, he goes into detail about why the designs are so interesting, focusing on the details that most car buyers might have overlooked. Whether you’re looking to buy or not, it’s a fascinating insight into some standout, everyday cars.

1. Mazda MX-5 (Mk.1)
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Stephenson really loves the MX-5 (or Miata, for our American readers), which he says refers back to classic roadsters of the 1960s and has classic proportions, walking a fine line between masculine and feminine. He loves the pop-up headlights, too.

2. Saab 900
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Admitting this might be a love it or hate it car, Stephenson says the interesting details are the highly-curved windscreen, reverse-mounted engine under the bonnet (which has an interesting opening mechanism itself), the door cutline that goes into the sill panel and an “almost negative slope” on the rear. It’s a clean, purposeful design, he says, which “will only feel more classic as time goes by”.

3. Renault Avantime
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“This car, on first look, might actually repulse you,” is a strange way to introduce a beautiful car, but it’s the modern architectural design and attention to detail that makes it a great-looking machine for Stephenson. He loves the extensive use of glass, the graphics on the C-pillar (at the rear), and the curvature on the rear windscreen, and he’s never seen rear lights quite like it. Stephenson reckons it’s a design way ahead of its time.


4. Porsche Boxster (986)
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One of “superstar” car designer Grant Larson’s vehicles, the original 986 Boxster puts the engine in the middle rather than back of the car, as found in the 911, allowing for a “more balanced” design over the rear wheels, Stephenson reckons. He also picks out what he calls the “cracked egg” headlights, with the classic Porsche oval that than spills out at the bottom, towards the centre of the car. Easily one of the most beautiful car designs of all time and, amazingly, you can just about find one for under £5,000.

5. Honda CR-X
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A car that looks faster than it is, the CR-X has a clean design and a great-looking rear end, with lots of glass, Stephenson says. It’s a popular one with car customisers, he notes, (and for gamers in the early Gran Turismo racers on PlayStation) but surprisingly doesn’t turn his nose up at that, simply saying many owners choose to make it even more aggressive.

6. Volkswagen Golf (Mk. 1)
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Proving good design can last a long time, the Giugiaro-designed Mk.1 Golf gets rid of the flowing, sensual aesthetic of cars that came before it, in favour of much “stricter”, starker lines. It has tight proportions, a “strong” C-pillar (especially on the four-door) and is still one of the best-looking cars in its segment, even today, according to Stephenson.

7. BMW E30 3-Series
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The designer of this car hired Stephenson, so it’s no surprise he’s fond of it. But it’s definitely a solid entry in this list, with a body that is “classy and sporty at the same time”. It eschews all that is “BMW”, he says, with the double headlamps either side, beautifully proportioned kidney grille, familiar side lines and Hoffmeister kink (the kinked line in the bottom corner of rear windows).

8. Mini Cooper S
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Including one of your own designs in a list of the most beautiful cars is a little self-congratulatory, perhaps, but the new Mini, which launched in 2000 under the BMW umbrella, definitely captured the spirit of the original while also bringing it right up to date. We’ve been running the latest Mini Electric, which still looks great, but time is definitely being kind to to Stephenson’s original design – the first generation looks more like an icon as the years pass. He likes the “layer cake” ethos, with the roof, glass section and lower base forming the fundamentals of the look. He picks out the Cooper S, though, with its more aggressive look and details such as the chrome fuel filler.



If you were interested in Frank Stephenson’s 8 most beautiful cars for under £5,000, you may also want to read our exclusive interview with Stephenson, from his time as chief designer at McLaren.