STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

If you want to understand design, you soon learn that remarkable failures are often more valuable than predictable successes. Failure and success are both surprising, but there are no surprises in design today. There is only a weak consensus about what the future holds. And design must ever project itself forwards in time because to be a designer hints at ambitions of a distant perfection. But no-one takes risks any more.

If Tesla is today’s most successful car, it says its owners are drowning in a toxic cocktail of social superiority, environmental guilt, cultural complacency and existential dread. Tesla is, in fact, deadly conventional: manufacture happens in a metalbashing factory at Fremont, CA, once belonging to GM, using a Schuler SMG hydraulic stamping press, all acquired at fire-sale prices.

It is so much more interesting to dwell on the poetry and bravery of Lost Causes. The most interesting things occur in that territory between conception and execution. For example, car designers’ original renderings or models rarely take account of necessary production realities. Those irrational cutlines are there because body engineers demanded them to make a dream real. But you needed a dream to start with.

Italian aviation offers many examples of inspiring calamities. A favourite of mine is the Breda Ba88 Lince, or Lynx, a twin-engined bomber of startling beauty, the prototype of which broke speed records in the years just before World War Two. Its structure was sophisticated: a spaceframe set inside a stressed monocoque because the Genio Aeronautico demanded the plane could pull 12g (more than a pilot could survive). This made it heavy. Fitted with the intended bombs, it had difficulty getting into the air. When sand-filters were deployed for desert operations, it would not take off at all.

Then there was the Macchi MC72 that first flew in 1931, a racing seaplane designed to compete for the Schneider Trophy. It still holds the speed record for aircraft of its type and a more slenderly beautiful machine cannot be imagined: it makes a Spitfire look like an old hobnailed boot. Unfortunately, pilots had difficulty flying a craft with twin Fiat Aviazione V12s in tandem (which in turn had difficulty holding onto their pistons), although not everyone lived to explain how scary it was. Each engine drove one of the contrarotating propellers. When I want to raise my spirits, I like to imagine exposing Greta Thunberg to the noise a Macchi MC72 made during a low-level pass at 440mph.

After the war, Fiat Aviazione’s Ingegnere Antonio Fessia joined Costruzioni Electro Meccaniche Saronna, a business founded by Nicola Romeo, a man in the motor trade. In partnership with the aircraft builder Caproni, Fessia’s CEMSA-Caproni car appeared at the 1947 Paris salon. It was an ambitious front-wheel-drive with a boxer engine that exceeded anybody’s ability to make it. Only a handful were built. But in 1955, Fessia joined Lancia and took his front-wheel-drive and boxer thinking with him, the result being the very fine Flavia.

Then there is another category of instructive calamity: designs so bad that questions are begged about the existence of right and wrong. Unrivalled here is the blinkingly maladroit Pontiac Aztek of 2000. It looks as though a skip has been dropped on a garden shed. The true benefit of its optional fitted camping tents was to make most of the car invisible. What did Aztek designer Tom Peters have in mind that we are not yet able to construe? Reach must always exceed grasp. So complete an assault on post-Renaissance aesthetics cannot have been arbitrary. Whichever way you look at it (and every way you look at one makes you wince), there is much to be learned from its study… even if only in the matter of corporate suicide: Pontiac failed soon after.

But I am wondering if, even at five to midnight for the car as we know it, there might be another approach to its design and manufacture. Decentralised, distributed manufacturing is becoming a reality. A vast metalbashing car plant, even Tesla’s, is anachronistic. Easily accessible computer-modelling and rapidly advancing carbon tech mean start-ups are now possible in aviation where the cost of entry was once impossibly deterrent. Amazing aircraft designs now appear weekly. With composites, even a bombed-up Lince would fly.

Maybe this is the challenge car designers need. Not continuing conventions, but daring for something different: a car exploiting flexible technologies, avoiding the monotony of mass production. A car whose design could be responsive to local tastes and needs. I mean to say, if you can build a plane in Alabama, you can build a car in Shropshire. What might a Shropshire car look like? Trying may be the first step towards failure, but it will be amusing to find out.

‘THE BLINKINGLY MALADROIT AZTEK LOOKS AS THOUGH A SKIP HAS BEEN DROPPED ON A GARDEN SHED’

STEPHEN BAYLEY SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.