STEPHEN BAYLEY
The Aesthete
At school, I persuaded myself that I would be an architect. In those days, that meant committing to maths and physics, which I made more palatable by private study of the abstruse aspects of vehicle dynamics. Pre-calculator, and before I was diverted by the simultaneous discovery of girls and beer, I would sequester myself with logarithms and Costin and Phipps’ Racing and Sportscar Chassis Design. If asked, I can calculate a slip angle as well as draw a cyma recta moulding. It doesn’t happen often.
The relationship of cars to architecture fascinates. Buildings have a structural core that carries mechanical and electrical services. They have a decorated skin, while quality of details betrays the intelligence of the architect. Or stupidity. It’s exactly comparable to car design. Cars and buildings must also accommodate people, serving practical needs and romantic whims.
The relationship is closest with interiors. An aedicule is a miniature, building-shaped shrine within a building. They often excite a keen desire to sit in them, rather as children enjoy sitting under tables. The best car interiors have exactly this same captivating and psychologically pleasing effect, plus aesthetic details and functional ergonomics to humble most buildings. You do not see many oligarch penthouses with interiors as finely realised as, say, an Audi A4’s. I would not be the first to say that if the skills of the car industry were applied to buildings, we’d all be delighted and have no housing shortage.
Architects often have a personal affinity for cars, so it’s odd how unsuccessful they have been when applying their art to the automobile. Le Corbusier, an architect infatuated with machines, employed a module based on the turning-circle of his favourite Voisin to create the ground-plan of the magnificent Villa Savoie at Poissy-sur-Seine. Then he applied himself to the design of a Voiture Minimum, which he retrospectively, outrageously and with no credible evidence claimed to be the source of the Citroën 2CV. His great rival, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, drew bodies for Adler in the early 1930s.
But, absurdly for one with a philosophical commitment to mass-market design, Gropius does not appear to have had any contact with Josef Ganz who, from 1931, was also at Adler and… developing the Volkswagen idea.
In 1934 the futurist R Buckminster Fuller created his ‘Dymaxion’ car, built on principles of lightweight structure. Unfortunately it was so light and Bucky’s aerodynamics were so, let us say, ‘informal’ that it tookoff during testing, killing the driver. Little more was heard of the Dymaxion car until Norman Foster built a replica as an act of homage to a structural pioneer whose vision remains inspirational. One day I will ask Norman how much Dymaxion thinking went into his heroic Late Machine Age Masterpiece, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Anyway, for all its oddity, Dymaxion was the fullest realisation of an architectural idea applied to the automobile. And that really was it for architecture’s formal relationship to the car. But I think there might be more coming down the road.
Cars changed the shape of cities by making every citizen independently mobile: cities were strung-out into suburbs. Soon, cities might be changing the shape of cars: smart signalling and smart streets will remove any need for cars to have instruments or lights. Shared ownership and intelligent utilisation will make car parks redundant so there will be nowhere to show-off. The psychologies of pride and competition will be less significant when ownership ceases to be the model. Ford thinks of itself today not as a car manufacturer, but a specialist in mobility systems. No-one will ever use ‘I’ve just bought a topof-the-range mobility system’ as a chat-up line.
There is speculation that people will move less in future, reducing the role of the car further. Cities will become ever denser, with less incentive to leave them: the major lift manufacturers are working on horizontal mag-lev systems that will change our assumptions about what buildings are, how they work and how we occupy them.
What would a car designed for such a city look like? Will architects or car designers decide? Maybe it will be Otis Elevator. And now I will take a deep breath, study a picture of a 1958 Packard parked outside Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, and feel a deep sense of loss.
‘NO-ONE WILL EVER USE “I’VE JUST BOUGHT A TOP-OF-THE-RANGE MOBILITY SYSTEM” AS A CHAT-UP LINE’