Ornament is crime
Cracking the scourge of car design’s fussy surfacing
Scrambled or fried? The way you take your eggs – or don’t – is completely up to you. Both methods provide equal sustenance, yet they occupy opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. One is chaos, the other natural order. Now I’m not calling fried eggs beautiful (Porsche 996 head‐ lamp critics will attest); far from it, but they do have a visual purity that is somewhat lost to the whisk.
I’m no bioscientist either, but I’ll confidently posit that when we first observe things, our eyes find focal points, follow lines and trace shapes to absorb and identify them. We respond more pleasurably to lines that flow than those that jar.
No matter how impressive the résumé, no one nails an executive job interview wearing a shirt that looks slept in. That’s why hot irons and dress shirts go together like Giugiaro and wedge cars.
Ha! You didn’t see that coming, did you? It’s my (hopefully) clever link into fussy surfacing and unnecessary details in car design. When the wedgy Triumph TR7 (pictured up top) caught the great Italian master’s attention at the 1975 Geneva mo‐ tor show, I’m sure he wished its designers had ironed out the flanks before putting it on display. After staring at the incongruous, curved crease line that decorates the side panels, he famously wandered around the car before announcing aghast: “Oh my God!
They’ve done it to this side as well.”
I’d wager Giorgetto is as disturbed as I am by the utterly graceless design features being liberally plastered across many of today’s cars. Take for example Hyundai’s latest Elantra; let’s call it the “Harvey Dent” edition. Now I’m all for a sprinkling of socalled visual interest but the door creases make my eyes boil. Where do they go? What purpose do they serve? Like yesterday’s scrambled eggs, they’re a cold mess. All the great car designs can be drawn, and easily identified, by two or three simple strokes of the pen. You need four just to begin drawing Harvey’s door and even then, all you have is the final stage of a tense game of pick-up sticks.
Other culprits include Opel whose signa‐ ture “blade” creases – first seen on the 2009 Insignia followed by the Astra GTC – still blight the flanks of the Crossland X.
My gripe is nothing new. In the early 20th century, Walter Gropius recognised the need to balance artist with craftsman or in carmaker terms: designer with engin‐ eer. The two must be in harmony, neither encouraged to wander down a strange tan‐ gent where function is elevated over form or vice versa. In 1919, he began the Bauhaus precisely for this purpose, quickly adding other great tenets such as truth to material and ornament is a crime. While fashion and personal taste continually evolve, these basic principles of good design still ring true.
Audis were once the unofficial ambassadors of Bauhaus. Think original TT and 1997 A6 but the latest A6 has return creases on its already blistered wheel arches; a design feature on a design feature. That’s like putting a pot plant on your television. And why do the headlights have more angles than an entire Tesla Cybertruck?
Sadly, no maker is innocent of unneces‐ sary decoration. It’s as if designers respond to marketing department demands for more look-at-me drama by throwing fake inlets, fake vents, fake chrome and fake exhaust tips at everything. To distract us, they enlarge front grilles beyond comic pro‐ portions. It’s truly the era of exaggeration.
Yet, change is afoot. Opel’s found some styling mojo with its newest versions of Corsa and Mokka eschewing decorative gimmicks for increased visual purity. Others too are returning to cleaner surfaces and purer shapes. Compare the featurelittered Honda Civic to the whistle-clean Honda e, or Volkswagen’s bordering-onthe-ornate Golf 8 to its unadulterated id3. It would appear the switch to electric propulsion has enabled a clean styling slate.
Even more hope lies with the next gener‐ ation of car designers who continue to flood online portfolio portals and social media pages with eye delights. It would be sinful not to point you in the direction of Esa Mustonen’s “Raw by Koenigsegg”, a digital hypercar concept so pure it hurts and so hot you could fry an egg on it (sorry).
Freelance writer and illustrator who swapped a career in conceptual product design for automotive journalism where he spent a decade desperately seeking lower word counts