STEPHEN BAYLEY
The Aesthete
In 1965, as IKEA was opening in front of hysterical crowds in Stockholm, Tom Tjaarda was in Turin quietly working on 1:1 drawings of what was to be the new Fiat 124 Spider. These were nearly the very last days before computers interfered with the creative process. Tjaarda also made a bozzetto of the Fiat, a full-size wooden model. The great sculptors of the Renaissance and Baroque used bozzetti too. There’s no better way to test your eye than watching a design actually take shape.
Tjaarda was automobile royalty. His father was Joop Tjaarda van Sterkenburg, designer of the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr. Cars like this were designed to remedy the endemic tedium of life in the Mid-West, and the young Tjaarda felt this existential yearning that the Great Plains generate. When studying architecture in The University of Michigan, he was seduced by lustrous Italian magazines such as Stile
Industria and Domus, glossy workshop manuals for la dolce
vita, a sunburnt otherwhere. So, in 1958 he found his way to Italy, introduced to Ghia’s Luigi Segre by his father. On his way Tjaarda was impressed, as you would be, by girls singing Volare on the train. This was a song, placed third in the Eurovision Song Contest of that year, about a man who had a dream that he was painted blue and could fly.
Anyway, soon a mid-Western lad was working on his own entire car: Ghia’s Innocenti 950S. Technically a compromised Austin-Healey Sprite, it was artistically uncompromisedly Italian. It was the sort of car that made you want to paint yourself blue and so on, having none of what Car & Driver meanly called the ‘tightjawed hardship’ associated with British sportscars.
So much so that Tjaarda’s Innocenti design language was donated to Fiat’s pretty cabrios of the early 1960s. These were notionally the work of Carrozzeria Farina, as it was still called when Tjaarda arrived there from Ghia in 1962. Battista Farina was a presence and so too was Franco Martinengo, each with exquisite eyes for detail and form. Tjaarda was trained to look at cut-lines from every angle. It was a tough, but good, school.
Tjaarda’s first Pininfarina car was the handsome, but hilariously incongruous, Chevrolet Corvette Rondine that appeared at the 1963 Paris Salon. It did a dutiful round of the shows, but was rejected by GM as not butch enough and too cheese-eating, perfumed European, as if a muscle-bound leader of The Teamsters were wearing make-up and a Pucci gown.
So, since Pininfarina never had any compunction about selling a good set of drawings twice, as it did with the Peugeot 404 and Morris Oxford, Tjaarda’s Rondine was adapted for the Fiat 124 Spider. This created some difficulty in the matter of proportions, as the little Fiat was nearly a foot narrower than the Stingray source material. Still, the resulting 1966 Tjaarda-Pininfarina Fiat was a styling masterpiece and much better resolved than its contemporary, the Alfa Romeo Duetto.
Car & Driver tested the 124 Spider 50 years ago and let the writer’s autonomic nervous systems do the talking while he took a break to mop his brow. The account begins with hyperventilating: ‘A lady. A lovely, sensual, responsive Italian lady’.
It continued: unlike, say, a Healey, which was rebarbative and did not use deodorant, the 124 was ‘submissive’. You do not need to be a recovering Freudian to read what’s going on here.
I have been driving the new Fiat 124 Spider. Aesthetically, it pays homage to Tjaarda’s original; it’s as much a self-conscious
repetizione as Roberto Giolito’s brilliant re-edition of the 500, but it caused in me a melancholic mood. If I am painted blue, it is not the azzurro of the sky but the sombre Delta Blues of regret.
The original Spider had Fiat’s twin-cam by Aurelio Lampredi, one of Ferrari’s great engine designers. And to emphasise a genetic Ferrari connection, in the Pininfarina studio during 1965, Tjaarda was simultaneously working on the Ferrari 365 California.
Design ideas are leakily uncontainable, and Tjaarda’s leaked. Had Ferrari made an export car for $3000 in 1966, it would have been the Fiat 124 Spider. In 2018, perhaps returning to the polite fiction of the InnocentiSprite, it’s a Mazda MX-5 in retro-Tjaarda drag.
Of course, the great Italian operatic tradition depends on one person being dressed as another and the effect is usually delightful. The 124 Spider is delightful too, but sad as well. The great tradition of Italian design has become merely the costume department. La dolce vita? Sometimes it’s bitter as well.
‘UNLIKE, SAY, A HEALEY, WHICH WAS REBARBATIVE AND DIDN’T USE DEODORANT, THE 124 WAS “SUBMISSIVE”’