STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

We are products of circumstances. Or I know I am. Living and working in central London gives me a very particular psychology, positioned between wired stylish swagger and cringeing defensive terror. Everyday life in the capital exceeds the most loopy and perfervid visions of the Italian Futurists. And while he’s only been dead eight years, JG Ballard’s bleak literary dystopia now seems serenely dated compared with the everyday life people enjoy in Peckham.

Twenty years ago I advised Ford on building a metropolitan hub for its far-flung creatives, the logic being that a Volvo designer in Göteborg needs a fix of Big City energy now and again. Ford no longer owns Volvo and the remains of its hub are in Soho: there can be no place on earth where a car is less useful or its presence more malign.

The ‘Global City’ is upon us: it’s not pretty and it’s very, very crowded. A journey that once took 10 minutes by car now takes 30. In many real-world cases, it is actually quicker to walk. Cars ceased to be rational answers to London’s problems in the last millennium.

I had a revelation recently. On receiving a nice inheritance, my wife said, ‘I’ll buy you that Porsche you’ve always wanted.’ After a nanosecond’s reflection I said, ‘That’s incredibly sweet of you, but no.’ W hy exactly would I want to own something which, if used as intended, would break the law?

It started me wondering. What would Dr Porsche design today? Not, I think, a £90,000, 4.49m-long, seven-speed manual car made of metal with a 64-litre petrol tank and 18-way adaptive sport seats with integral thorax airbag and carbon finish. No. I think his imagination would be on different vectors.

The ur-Porsche of 1948 was more a thesis about lightness and efficiency than a prosthetic to luxury lifestyle. Today, if Dr Porsche had something radical to say about personal transport, it would not have a rearmounted flat-six. I doubt it would even have wheels.

Designers often depart from passionately held original ideas. Richard Rogers? Do you still think houses should be on ambulant stilts? Norman Foster? Are you still proposing glass-walled buildings, with their intolerable maintenance costs and poor thermal characteristics? Buckminster Fuller? Would you still be designing threewheelers that take-off uncommanded and kill the driver?

There really is such a thing as fitness-for-purpose, even though meaning has been drained from the expression by careless abuse. The reason why the Fiat Cinquecento and Land Rover have been so very enduring is because they are perfectly suited to the environments where they are (still) used: the one in the narrow streets of Italian villages, the other in Welsh bogs. Fundamentally, each of these cars is unimprovable.

So too were the crass fantasies of Harley Earl and Virgil Exner. Of course they were technically absurd, but nevertheless a perfect fit with an America where Freddy Cannon in sparkling trousers was a star. Great cars have soul and that soul is connected to genius loci, the old Roman concept of a ‘sense of place’. This is just one of several reasons why, for example, the Maserati Levante will, whatever its small virtues, never be admired. It has no answers to the vital questions: who, what, why and where? It comes from nowhere and belongs nowhere.

Now, that sense of place is itself on the move. While disenchanted with daily news of ludicrous 800bhp supercars, I’m alert to micro-cultures that sense the beauty and poetry remaining in the idea of personal mobility. Much more than an unusable Aventador, the inspiring itinerant ‘vanlife’ web community, with its Volkswagen Vanagons and tired Ford Econolines, enjoys the freedom and pleasure (as opposed to lethal expense and potential criminalisation) that were meant to be fundamental to the experience of owning and driving a motor vehicle.

I see someone in a hypercar and I think, ‘You poor, poor sap.’ I see a vanlife photograph of a wittily repurposed VW Syncro camper in the Karoo and I feel a deep and authentic pang of envy. This is what motoring was meant to be: using a benign machine to enhance private experience while making discoveries.

So it will not be a new 991 for me. More likely an old van. And if I had one, its mobile library would include Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide To Cooking

On Your Engine. Did you know you can wrap a piece of salmon in foil, after seasoning with salt and pepper and a little ginger, and bake it on the exhaust to enjoy at journey’s end? Now that it takes an hour’s round trip to get to and from my local drycleaner, this is a book I need right now, here, in London.

‘JG BALLARD’S BLEAK DYSTOPIA SEEMS SERENELY DATED COMPARED WITH EVERYDAY LIFE IN PECKHAM’

STEPHEN BAYLEY Author, critic, consultant, broadcaster, debater and curator, Stephen co-created the Boilerhouse Project at London’s V&A, was chief executive of The Design Museum, and fell out with Peter Mandelson when he told him the Millennium Dome...