Blog archive February 2025
09.02.25 / 02 / countach
While we're on the subject, this recreation of the Lamborghini Countach is marvellous. Lamborghini should be ashamed. Their own 50th anniversary version misses the mark by comparison - fussy and cluttered where the original was spare and angular. It's hard to improve on one of the best-looking cars ever designed.
09.02.25 / 01 / history of the motor car
History of the Motor Car (Brooke Bond, 1968) is a peculiar collection. 50 cards running up to 1968 but the first 30 are before 1930. Only five American cars and none after 1930. 22 are racing cars.
The card captions don’t mention styling at all and the appearance of cars very little. They go into detail about the machinery. One has the impression that it was all put together by a vintage car enthusiast into tinkering with engines! This is an emphasis that I notice in other (British) car books of the period - the kind of people who were writing them at that time probably did spend their pre-war youth tinkering with sports car engines.
The key development of the 1930s was that the shell of a car (and therefore its appearance) became separated from the machinery underneath - for reasons of aerodynamics, but then the idea of styling - that the appearance of a car could be changed year on year to stimulate sales regardless of the engineering.
I would have cards for the Chrysler Airflow of 1934 to talk about this, give the Citroen Traction Avant its own card not just an illustration, and maybe add a Tatra as a radical and influential development.
For postwar cars I would add a 57 Chrysler or a 59 Cadillac for the fins and to discuss the business of yearly styling updates. Maybe the Corvair, for its design influence and safety issues. From a British angle I would add the Ford Cortina - the future of the mass market. Perhaps a bubble car! All of the above to be achieved by omitting some of the obscure vintage cars.
In a way the 60s were a competition between the Issigonis idea of the car and the Ford idea. Issigonis was an essentialist - cars should be what they are, should have the most advanced engineering possible, should have the most room in the smallest space, should not be styled for passing fashions. Ford preferred conventional engineering, periodically refreshed styling to give a sense of newness, options packages for personalisation. Ultimately the Ford approach won, because it understood the car to be a social and aspirational object.
This was a subset of a wider battle between Modernism, seeking the essential, functional and unchanging form, and consumerism, seeking social positioning and personal fulfilment. This is something that nags away at me at the moment, because the turn to consumerism has been so damaging ecologically, in a way that a Modernist world of just-enough would not have been.
