Product Description
Quote Blueprint Magazine Sept. 1999
[the Moving Objects book is]Beautifully designed with informative essays by Stephen Bayley, Brian Sewell and others...
Excerpted from "Moving Objects" by Stephen Bayley and Giles Chapman. Copyright 1999. All rights reserved. Used with permsission.
INTRODUCTION Industrial design, along with rock music and the movies, is one of the distinctive cultural forms of the twentieth century. And the most complete expression of industrial design is the motor car. But the very first cars were not designed, at least not in the sense meant by Emilio Ambasz when he explained that design "begins once the functional and behaviourial needs have been satisfied. We create objects not only because we want to satisfy the pragmatic needs of man, but mainly because we need to satisfy the demands of our passions and imaginations. The designer's milieu may have changed, but the task, I believe, remains the same, to give poetic form to the pragmatic." Karl Benz' German Imperial Patent 5789 may have been the first complete conception of the car, a formal record of the stuttering explosive tricycle which frightened the horses and citizens of Mannheim over the winter of 1885-1886, but it was a pragmatic technical experiment, not a poetical interpretation of a belief. In those days filling stations did not exist and on its first outing, Benz had to stop his tricycle at an Apotheke to buy a phial of petroleum spirit. The local newspaper described the first car as "repugnant, diabolical and dangerous". It was experimental, ingenious, revolutionary, but not a thing of beauty. That would only come later. A restless inventor, as soon as his tricycle had come to life, Benz moved on and left the development of the car to others. Chief amongst these was, of course, Henry Ford. If Benz proved that a self-propelled auto-mobile was technically feasible, then Ford sensed and eventually realised the near universal appeal of such a machine. In his creation of an affordable, popular "gasoline buggy" Ford made available a reliable car that was the expression of a profound human craving for independence and mobility. Henry Ford said he was driven' to make his first practicable car in order to escape the crushing tedium of life on a mid-Western farm. It is this essential spirit of freedom and self-expression released by the auto-mobile that is the source of mankind's passionate affair with the car (and only unthinkably totalitarian governments would ever take it away). But Ford, too, was no aesthete, notwithstanding his most famous remark about the universality of black paint. This was, in fact, an expression of his interest in achieving manufacturing efficiencies through the standardised use of fast-drying black paint rather than an aesthetic credo : in those days coloured paint took up to two weeks to dry. Yet while Ford himself had said that he was inclined to raise his hat whenever saw a beautiful Alfa-Romeo, it was a truth universally acknowledged that he took no interest in poetic design, only in pragmatic achievement. George Walker, the industrial designer who later joined the Ford Motor Company, had been warned off presenting Mr Ford with a selection of brightwork door handles mounted lasciviously on black velvet. In My Life and Work Ford wrote : "I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces." Ford's "simplest design that modern engineering can devise" was, of course, the ineffable Model T. Ford saw his task as continuously refining this car so as to approach a sort of absolute. The elementary Model T was indeed continuously refined between 1908 and 1927 and was such an epochal success that to a very large degree Ford's ambition was satisfied : any American in employment could afford to buy a car. They did. A new episode in civilization had begun. Half a century after the birth of the Model T the car had changed the world. In her brilliant, but bitter, attack on the car's influence on town planning, Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962) that "We Americans hardly need ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia : what is the purpose of life ? For us, the answer will be clear, established, and for all practical purposes indisputable : the purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles." But just as Ford had realised the social utility of Benz' invention, so it was General Motors who realised the commercial opportunities which the new market of mobilised Americans offered. To Ford, the car was an absolute democratic necessity, a utilitarian tool, an expression of man's ingenuity and his freedom. To Alfred Sloan, the founder of General Motors, that same car represented an opportunity to seduce the consumer with ideas of social competition and cultural modelling which are still with us today. It was Alfred Sloan who had no less an idea, unconsidered by Benz and Ford, that consumers might be persuaded to buy more cars, more expensively, more often if those cars were styled, if they were poetic as well as pragmatic. The beginning of this gigantic concept was when, in recognition of the same paint problem that had interested Henry Ford, General Motors formed a "Paint and Enamel Committee"whose brief was to "study the question of art and color combinations in General Motors Products". The man ultimately chosen to do this was a flamboyant Californian called Harley Earl whose custom car business had catered to the whims of the first generation of Hollywood stars. Earl had told GM's Larry Fisher that his customising skills could make a common Chevrolet look like a Cadillac. Sloan had found his man and Harley Earl was hired to create the Art and Color Department. Car design was born. Ten years later Earl re-christened the department the Styling Division. Car design had come of age. Looking back we can see that the creation of Art and Color in Detroit was an exact parallel to the events in New York that established consultant design as a modern professional business. It was around the year 1927, or soon after, that Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague and Henry Dreyfuss set up their studios in Manhattan. Just as Sloan had realised that Ford's practical genius had opened-up a new market for dreams and desires, so this first generation of industrial designers worked on the assumption that the success of the American economy meant consumer demand was all but satisfied. Consumers were moving beyond mere subsistence into the complex area of taste. Irregular desires could now be excited....by design. What they all had in common was that consumer design was construed to be a visionary process : the designer was expected to do no less than look into the future and make it happen....now. It was under Harley Earl that General Motors established so many of the working practices which still dominate car design today. With its five manufacturing divisions, General Motors was able to offer, not just functionally efficient auto-mobiles, but cars loaded with meaning. From the manufacturing point-of-view, the enormous fixed costs of production tooling meant that there was an economic requirement for design to be, as it were, superficial. Earl developed the studio practice of clay-modelling, before television he showed concept cars to excited customers at nationwide Motoramas, he told his designers to "go all the way you can and then pull back some", he understood and exploited evocative imagery and he reached the very top of what was then the biggest and most successful corporation on the planet. Earl's extraordinary designs had by the fifties whipped the industry and the customer into such a cyclone of manufacturing and consumption that the notorious annual model change came about. Critics called this wasteful process (so much at odds with the European design ideal of integrity, clarity and harmony) "planned obsolescence", but one clever General Motors executive said "We haven't depreciated these cars, we have appreciated your mind". There is perhaps no more complete expression of American civilization than, say, a 1953 Chevrolet Corvette, or the 1955 Ford Thunderbird that followed it. But an alternative tradition of car design had evolved from very different sources in Europe. While all major European countries had coach-building traditions, in Italy these carrozzerie matured into specialist car design studios whose perfectly judged executions of elegant bodywork betrayed a culture where easy style is a commonplace. Outstanding among a list of carrozzerie that includes Zagato, Touring, Frua, Ghia, Michelotti and Vignale were Pininfarina and Bertone. Their techniques were very different to the Americans. While in the US, designers were inspired by pictures of jet airplanes torn from glossy magazines and worked under the massive capitalist imperatives of gobal industries, in Italy the designers of Farina and Bertone were far more concerned with finding absolute forms of sculptural beauty, to make metal sing. Their designs were part of mankind's restless flirtation with gorgeous shapes, successive attempts to define the absolute. As independent companies they were not restricted by precise marketing objectives, they were more simply concerned to sell a conception of automotive beauty to a manufacturer. Their tools and techniques resembled the studios of renaissance sculptors, as did their instincts. Ventilating louvres were made with a tool called a gola d luv, panels were beaten or formed with a batoir or a tas a cheur. And the panels were ultimately tested and formed over a full-scale wooden buck called a mascherone. In this way was the beautiful Alfa-Romeo Giulietta Sprint made by Bertone, a vintage car that looked very modern, it was the last time Alfa-Romeo supplied the carrozzerie with chassis ready for coachbuilt bodies. A technical antique, its lines laid the basis for all modern Alfa-Romeos. The poetics of car design are overwhelmingly influenced by style and symbolism. Occasionally, technical or statutory innovations excite change, but they are soon absorbed into the aesthetic mainstream. This is what happened with streamlining (known in the wind tunnel as aerodynamics) and, later, with safety legislation. Technically speaking the laws of aerodynamics may be aesthetically restrictive, but the achievement of designers was to turn them into an element in the vocabulary of style. Only very briefly was aerodynamics considered to offer a universal solution; soon experiments proved that the torpedo shape, known to have perfect penetration', also had very imperfect stability. At the same time, the very first car wholly designed by aerodynamics pioneer, Wunibald Kamm, the American Cunningham C-4RK of 1952, was so far from being a machine of inevitable, functional beauty, a pig ugly brute of a thing. Again, after seventies legislation required forms of crash protection, designers quickly absorbed protective imagery into their catalogue of gestures. Sometimes great cars are brought about by engineers whose essential motivation is an engineering idea. These include Ferry Porsche, Dante Giacosa, Pierre Boulanger and Alec Issigonis. Here it is fascinating to see the functionalist truisms working through and entering the visual language: Porsche's original 356 was conceived as pure engineering, but established a style which designers are still developing fifty years on. Dante Giacosa's fabulous little FIAT Cinquecento might have been an engineering proposition first and foremost, but its gorgeous appearance surely betrays the hand of a (sadly anonymous but) masterfully self-conscious designer well able to articulate the concepts of small', efficient' and enjoyable' through meaningful shape. And the famous Citron DS, the car that gave rise to Roland Barthes' unforgettable comparison of cars to cathedrals, might also have been fundamentally a technical conception, but its astonishing bodywork was by the sculptor (!) Flaminio Bertoni. Equally, while no designer' worked on Issigonis' influential car, the next generation Mini apes its style. That idiosyncratic shape has become a part of the language of design. In Britain the premier museum of design, the Victoria & Albert, does not collect cars because, hobbled by Victorian taxonomy, its highly territorial keepers cannot decide whether an auto-mobile is sculpture or metalwork, but as long ago as 1951 New York's Museum of Modern Art recognised the place of car design in contemporary culture, something which artists like Francis Picabia and Fernand Lger had done twenty years before. MoMA's Curator of Design, Arthur Drexler, organised a simply show called "Eight Automobiles" to demonstrate his belief that cars were "rolling sculpture". The eight included a Jeep, a Cisitalia, an MG TC, a Lincoln Continental, a Talbot with bodywork by Figoni & Falaschi, a Cord, a Mercedes-Benz SS and a Bentley. The Cisitalia, whose body was designed by Pininfarina, soon found its way into the Museum's permanent collection where it was much later followed by a Formula One Ferrari and, in 1996, by an E-Type Jaguar, a car whose sensual, feline beauty makes sixties sculpture look ham-fisted. Drexler's description of the Cisitalia remains a classic of formal analysis as applied to industrial design. In the following passage at least as much aesthetic meaning is extracted from a motor car as from, say, a David Smith sculpture. Drexler writes : "[Its] body is slipped over its chassis like a dust-jacket over a book....the openings Farina cuts into the jacket provide some of the most skillfully contrived details of automobile design....to maintain the sculptural unity of the entire shape, its surfaces are never joined with sharp edges, but are instead wrapped around and blunted. The door is minimized. The back of the car, particularly the fender, is lifted at an angle rising from the strict horizontal baseline which gives stability to the design. Thus both ends of the car gain an extraordinary tension, as though its metal skin did not quite fit over the framework and had to be stretched into place. This accounts, in part, for that quality of animation which makes the Cisitalia seem larger than it is". No-one doubts that cars are among the most moving objects we possess, that they are a defining expression of contemporary culture. But what of the designer ? Can the designer claim the status of an artist ? Like rock music and movies, car design is an essentially collaborative activity. Like rock music and movies, it is an industrial activity too complex for any individual to claim the sort of authorship which defines conventional notions of art. Harley Earl could not even draw, instead by a process of critique and recommendation (some would say intimidation) this extraordinary man saw his thoughts realised in metal. One of Earl's most memorable pieces of creative direction to his studio was this "I want that line to have a duflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a Rashoom or a Zong". George Walker, the designer responsible for the 49 Ford, said you had to give credit not just to him, but to the nine hundred others involved. Car design is a great art form and typical of the century that gave rise to its because it is industrial and collaborative. Car designers are not necessarily great thinkers like Charles Eames or Walter Gropius, nor even great salesmen like Raymond Loewy. The universal appeal of the auto-mobile makes philosophy redundant and the manufacturers have their own separate sales forces. Instead, car designers are allowed an unusual amount of concentration. Accordingly, they have developed a design language that leaves few unmoved and turned the auto-mobile into something powerfully evocative of ideas and beliefs. Against the visual drama and emotional appeal and collective effort of a 1964 Ford Mustang, much fine art' coming from individual painter's studios or craft' from potter's wheels seems thin or solipsistic stuff. The ordinary car is part of civilization's continuing quest for accessible meaning and beauty. As Barthes said, cars are "The supreme creation of an era conceived with passion by unknown artists and consumed in image, if not in usage, by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object".
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