The motor car has almost completed its journey. It started off as a means of transportation, then become a social signifier, and gradually an extension of your personality. Soon, it might become little more than white goods on wheels, a commodity plugged in each night and recharged like an electric toothbrush. Having taken the train to work for several years, I appreciate the contrast between personal and public transport and also realise – ignoring the cost of fuel, the bane of traffic congestion, and punitive road tolling – that mass-produced design is still a magical thing.
I recall that Manchester architect Ian Simpson was Alfa Romeo’s first customer for the new “8C” a few years ago, and that prompted me to speculate not so much on which cars designers drive, but the subtle forces which inform their decisions. There are the personal associations we make with certain types of car, and then there is the role of the ad men, those pluggers, promoters and hucksters who push things in our direction. Years ago, a book called The Hidden Persuaders was written about them, and if anything their influence has become ever more pervasive.
A Herald Vitesse, from an era before lifestyle was codified
Where driving was once celebrated for its own sake, advertisers have shifted their emphasis towards pushing “lifestyle”, that cliché which is a greatly debased version of Alfred Adler’s original concept which encapsulated how we approach living in general. Interestingly, Adler is better known for coining the term “inferiority complex”, which is something else the ad men play on when trying to shift tin boxes… As originally conceived, lifestyle was a holistic term, whereas it now means appealing to our materialist side by fitting cars with aircon, MP3 players and Satnav by integrating them into our emotional gestalt – then emphasising those features over handling and road-holding.
Designers, on the other hand, are a superficial breed and it should be easy to market cars to them on the basis of appearance. Right?
Well, it worked for Audi. The Audi “TT” was launched over a decade ago, and immediately reached out to those who like to think they appreciate good design. Efforts were made to align the TT with the Bauhaus, yet arguably Audi didn't use Bauhaus design principles to design a car which ended up looking like the TT, because the purity of its aerodynamics was compromised (ironically) in the effort to make it resemble the Porsche 356 or a pre-war Auto Union racing car. They tied themselves in unreasoning knots. That the Bauhaus was mentioned repeatedly in press releases was down to the advertising men: Round One to the Hidden Persuaders.
The issue becomes ever more interesting when you realise that the Porsche 356 *was* designed, or perhaps more accurately, engineered, in accordance with the principles of the Bauhaus. It held with the Form follows Function credo, and arose from a strict economy of means plus a close study of the nature of the materials. It’s said that the Bauhaus invented industrial design as a discipline, but as far as I’m aware, no production cars were created there. 
Group B rally Quattro
Porsche isn’t Audi, either, yet the Audi company had a recent archetype which certainly did follow Bauhaus precepts: the original Quattro (which motoring journalists amusingly refer to as the Ur-Quattro), penned by British designer Martin Smith. Whereas the TT apes the curves of Ferry Porsche’s 356, and the VW Beetle before that – the Quattro is a far better approximation of the “severe, geometric, undecorated” form which the Bauhaus proposed. It was also built to do a job: win the World Rally Championship, so those big intakes and blistered arches naturally followed its function. It’s ironic, then, that non-car designers (and hairdressers, apparently) prefer the TT…
I’ve known several architects who drove Scandinavian cars. One owned a classic Saab 99 which had covered an interplanetary mileage and whose flanks were scabbed with rust, making the car look as if it had been strafed. Saab, which went out of business last year, was known for its idiosyncratic designs: the ignition lock was set into the transmission tunnel, the wraparound windscreen follows a tighter radius than other cars’, and the long overhangs with a very short wheelbase made their cars unlike anything else on the road. The firm began as an aircraft company, and during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s it was particularly good at marketing its cars as aerodynamic, bred from its Viggen jet fighter.
A classic Saab 99 with Minilites…
As with Audi, it had a great heritage in rallying, but instead the Hidden Persuaders latched on to the dual sheep/ wolf mentality of designers – and architects are no different in that regard. Whilst you may need to stand out, as a lone wolf who markets himself as a designer with recognisably individual solutions, you don’t want to stand out too much, otherwise you’ll part company with the design flock. In comparison to Audi’s Bauhaus spiel, Saab’s appeal perhaps lay in its predictable idisyncracy: just different enough to the norm to satisfy the conformal individualist.
Old-school Citroëns once attracted the same clientele. I recall attending a Dundee Motor Show in the early 1980’s, when it was held in Douglasfield Works, an enormous spinning mill built by Jute Industries in the late 1950’s, then abandoned and demolished around 1985. Edward & Stewart, the local Citroën dealers, had a stand, and under the white banners with italicised red Helvetica branding, there were pocket-sized brochures with moody photography in lush colours. I later found out that Sarah Moon had worked for Citroën, from the “SM” onwards, and her high art/ fashion pedigree showed. It had emotional appeal, rather than the colder, mechanistic design of the Saab.
Anyhow, if the beautifully-marketed cars were one facet of the company’s appeal, the cars themselves offered many things. The landmark model was the DS, which brutalist architect Alison Smithson even wrote a book about, and it was followed by the CX and latterly the XM. Each had a little less Citroën magic about it – but with distinctive styling, a low ride height achieved with fiendishly complex pneumatic suspension, and headlights which swivelled as you steered, many big Citroëns were bought by the architectural faction, from the Smithsons to Jonathan Meades who travelled around Britain in an XM. Like the Audi, or the Saab, they were a statement car.
Citroën SM promo photo
However, the country whose cars have real design allure is Italy. Given exotics like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati to work with, the ad men have an easy job to convince you on style, flair and formal innovation. Other marques interpret Italian design differently – but the trick is to allude to supercars whilst shifting larger volumes. Lancia and Alfa Romeo succeeded partly thanks to something unique to the Italian car industry, the styling carrozeria such as Pininfarina, Ital Design and Bertone. While they built show cars and prototypes on aluminium spaceframes, they had to engineer production cars using the monocoque structure which 99% of cars are pressed from. The invisible rift which grew up between the Italians’ detail and structural designers is worth exploring.
It’s said that there are only seven stories in the world – each one we tell is a variation on one or other of them. Similarly, people are often characterised as belonging to one of a handful of archetypes, which have fuelled psychological theories for the past century and a bit. Designers are likewise typecast as having a head either for structure, or for detail. While product designers like Alessi and Memphis are biased towards the details, we may believe the carrozeria have to concentrate on structure: as with couturiers, the cut and hang of the garment is all…
Alfa Romeo Brera
Anyone who sets up this proposition is asking for it to be demolished. Cars are complex, and none can exist exclusively in the realm of either detail or structure – we need to experience both the micro scale, and to understand the overarching macro arrangement. Likewise, in order to write a piece like this, I need to be talk about detail, yet become steeped in structure. All this mucking around with concepts, facts and opinions needs to be organised within a logical framework. A formal structure is the obvious way to do that. So should I eat, drink and breathe structure, like a Doozer?
No. Wrong. Bad. Mistake.
The proof of this misconception lies in the most detailed of detail things – the car key. Alfa Romeo “do” car keys particularly well, because they realise that the things which you come into contact with most (door handles, steering wheel, gear knob) are crucial in shaping your opinion of the car as a whole. The material and tactile details of the key, transponder and fob tell you all about the quality of the product. The Hidden Designers realise that selling cars to the design-conscious sometimes hinges on little more than making them feel good, using leather, chrome and enamel.
Aston Martin Bulldog, a one-off designed by William Towns
Of course, car designers themselves still dream of creating a modern Tatra – a wide, sleek saloon with a rear-mounted V8. Peugeot created a 908 RC concept car which excited fellow car designers, but would have sold in tiny numbers had it gone into production. Or perhaps they hope to be given the unique chance which William Towns was given, when he designed the Bulldog for Aston Martin – the most uncompromising car to emerge for decades, and most likely the utter polar opposite of what a Bauhaus designer would have come up with…
My next piece for the printed edition of Urban Realm will be contribution to the debate on Scottish identity … and after that perhaps a sidelong glance at the architecture of our car-making industry.
