B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

In a paraphrase of an idea first formulated by Roland Barthes, the mercurial British critic Stephen Bayley once claimed that if Michelangelo were alive today he would not be wasting his time in Rome carving marble tomb sculptures for the Vatican. He would be in Detroit working in brown modelling clay on the modern world’s true art form, the design of the motor car. Barthes had already gone three centuries further back. He suggested that the anonymous masons of Chartres would by now be putting their creativity to good use on a Citroën production line.

Bayley was writing in the 1980s, when the future of the car industry seemed a lot more secure than it does now. It was before car making’s centre of gravity had shifted decisively east, and long before parametric digital modelling had supplanted clay. What lay behind Bayley’s words was the idea that contemporary art had lost the power to reach an audience beyond the walls of the gallery. He was trying to suggest just how remarkable an object a car, made in its millions, really is. Perhaps more than any other consumer object, cars have shaped the texture and shape of modern life. They are the distillation of both the blessings and the curses of mass production. A car can be beautiful. It emotionally engages us, and it demonstrates the extent of human ingenuity and resourcefulness. A car offers a sense of personal freedom. At the same time, cars tear our cities apart in their unquenchable thirst for tarmac; their exhaust emissions threaten the future of life on this planet. They are a lethal threat to pedestrians, cyclists and other road users.

The ubiquity of the car has tended to innoculate us to its significance, but we do not have to consider a car as a piece of art to understand the huge impact it has had on the world. It is, for better or worse, the peak of the industrial culture that gave birth to the practice of modern design. Yet its power is waning. The Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford, who was no more comfortable a personality than Steve Jobs, used to be the model of the modern corporation, with its company towns, its own orchestra, its own company uniform. Apple and Google have supplanted Ford and IBM as the model corporations that others seek to emulate. And while there are now companies around the globe who have managed to make cars more profitably, and more effectively, than Ford, they are essentially in the business of refining a mature product that may have a limited future.

Bayley’s proposition would have been more convincing but for one of the more unexpected developments of the post-millennial museum-building explosion: the creation of a mass public for contemporary art. As demonstrated by audiences of more than four million a year for Tate Modern, art did indeed turn out to be the real art form of the twenty-first century. And there is evidence that when artists do turn their attention to car design they do not make much of a fist of it. The Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo, for example, worked with the very British consultancy the Design Research Unit when it asked him to take on the styling of a car. Somewhat improbably, it was a project for the Jowett Motor Manufacturing Company, a Yorkshire-based factory that went through a short-lived burst of inventiveness in the early 1950s before it imploded, setting an example studiously followed by almost every other British car company. Despite Gabo’s training as an engineer, his bulbous car body looked less than convincing by comparison with his revolutionary work as a young artist.

Barthes had been dazzled by the beauty of the Citroën DS. It was a car that looked so modern when it was launched in 1955 that he suggested that it seemed as if it had dropped from the sky as a visitation from another planet. This was the kind of car that you could believe an artist of Gabo’s calibre might indeed have produced. But cars are the product of many people, none of whom can operate effectively if they see themselves as artists. In his most feverish passage in Mythologies, Barthes suggested that the DS was the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, a car that in its smoothness seemed to suggest the kind of perfection that is not easily achieved by human hands alone. The extraordinarily long-drawn-out process that the DS went through certainly suggests an enterprise on the epic scale of building a cathedral. It took eighteen years, from when it was initiated in 1937 by Pierre Boulanger, the man who took over the running of the company from André Citroën, for the completed car to drive down the Champs-Élysées for the first time in 1955. Boulanger wanted to make what he called the world’s best, most beautiful, most comfortable and most advanced car, a masterpiece to show the world, and the Americans in particular, what France could do. He did not live long enough to see it happen.

André Lefèbvre was the engineer who made Boulanger’s brief technically possible, along with the teams who worked on the engine, the suspension system and the brakes. Each element was in itself an extraordinarily creative piece of work. The look of the car was the responsibility of Flaminio Bertoni, an Italian, who, although he could certainly draw and had an interest in sculpture, had begun his working life as an apprentice carpenter in a coach-building workshop. If Gabo did not make much of a car designer, Bertoni, brilliant though he was as a car designer, was equally not much of a sculptor. And in that dissonance is the essence of the problem for those who see the car as the ultimate contemporary art form. Real cars are designed by people who do not look like artists, who do not sound like artists, and who are motivated by an entirely different set of aims and ambitions from those of the world of art.

Cars are a highly specialized form of design. They encourage a different mindset from other branches of design, not just for those who design them, but for the people who think about them. I find cars endlessly fascinating, but driving them is not a pleasure for me. Rather than keys to mobility and independence, the cars I have owned became extensions of my kitchen table, filling up with debris: apple cores going brown, orange peel, torn envelopes, stacks of books, old newspapers, bags of washing destined for the laundry, and those self-adhesive clear-plastic envelopes that parking tickets come in. For me, this mobile tip is the most immediate physical experience of a car rather than the sculptural refinement of the bodywork.

By and large, there is little serious crossover between automotive design and product design, furniture, fashion or architecture, other than at the most trivially superficial level of a paint scheme specified by Victoria Beckham. This is despite the historically celebrated exceptions. The limousine that Walter Gropius helped to style for Adler in 1930 was impressive - even if it did not look much like his architecture - but compared with the technical innovation of Citroën or Volkswagen it was a historical anomaly. Le Corbusier’s ambitious attempt to persuade the French car industry to put his design for a low-cost lightweight forerunner of the Citroën 2CV into production ended in failure.

The project that Mario Bellini put forward in 1972 for the New York Museum of Modern Art show on Italian design, ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’, the Kar-a-Sutra, was more promising. Part funded by Citroën, it might really have helped provoke the change in thinking at Renault that eventually led to the introduction of the people carrier, a fundamental reconfiguration of the basic elements of the conventional format of the European car in the 1980s, taking it from three compartments - engine, passenger and boot - to a single volume.

But otherwise, these noises-off have had very little impact on the approach of mainstream car designers. Cars, on the other hand, have fascinated designers. Architects in particular have struggled to replicate the speed and precision of a car production line on construction sites, without much success. What makes Barthes’s words so arresting is that they are so unusual. Cars are a universal part of the landscape, yet outside the claustrophobically narrow view of the automobile-obsessed, they are intellectually invisible. Barthes was looking at a car from the perspective of a wider view of culture, not from behind the wheel. He was interested in meaning rather than acceleration and horsepower.

Pontus Hulten, the founding director of the Pompidou Centre and a man who did more than anybody to shape the contemporary practice of museum-keeping, had a similarly broad view. Hulten curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. With remarkable foresight, it was titled ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’. Long before digitalization had overturned the analogue order, the transistor was regarded with just as much excitement. Alongside Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (1915) and Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s hauntingly beautiful photographs of the racing cars of the 1912 French Grand Prix, one of Hulten’s most provocative exhibits was a car designed and built for the Indianapolis 500 circuit that year. Driven by Graham Hill in pre-race tests, it achieved a record for the circuit of just over 171 mph. Hulten was fascinated by the car’s shape, and wrote that

the modern racing car is a very remarkable object on the border between technology and art. Although it has no practical use it is extremely functional. No one who constructs a racing car would dream of modifying it for the sake of aesthetics. Yet many of the cars must be regarded as extremely beautiful. The racing car is the apotheosis of the great dream of the 1920s as the beauty of the functional pushes the possible as close to the impossible as one can come.

If nothing else, Hulten’s words are a reflection on the meaning of the word ‘functional’. But they also slide over the surface of a remarkable story. Hulten singled out one of the five cars made for Andy Granatelli by Colin Chapman, the engineering genius of the British motor-racing circuit and the founder of the Lotus car marque. Granatelli had gone to Chapman with the idea of a turbine-engine-driven car, rather than the previously universal piston drive. Working with a Pratt & Whitney turbine engine originally developed for use in helicopters, Chapman’s design team produced the distinctive wedge-shaped car that attracted Hulten’s attention. In its day, it was the fastest car that America had ever seen. But this was not the end of Chapman’s contribution to the evolution of the motor car. He recycled the lessons he learned from the race track into road cars.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the coolest thing by far to watch on the still black-and-white 405-line cathode ray television sets of the period was an endlessly knowing drama series called The Avengers. In its far from subtle way, beneath the glitter of a continual and stylishly entertaining struggle between good and evil, as represented by the fearlessly nonchalant agents of a slightly off-piste Whitehall department and assorted megalomaniac diamond-collared-kitten-stroking villains, it was trying to tell us something about the changing nature of contemporary British life. Each week Diana Rigg, as Emma Peel, inevitably dressed in a black leather catsuit, would join Patrick McGee’s John Steed, kitted out in bowler from Locke and pinstripes tailored by Huntsman, with a carnation in the buttonhole, to take on assorted enemies of the state.

The point made by their contrasting wardrobes was put even more forcefully by the cars that they drove. Steed had a vintage Bentley the size of a haystack, with aerodynamics to match. Peel got around in a svelte and glossy new Lotus Elan. This was the product of Chapman turning his attention away from the almost useless usefulness of the Formula One track, crossing the barrier from pure engineering, if such a thing exists, and into the semantics of motoring. At the touch of a button, its sporty, swivelling headlamps would pop up to emerge from the dune-like moulded contours of the body when required, and duck back out of sight when not needed. The gesture implied a promise to reduce drag coefficients but actually was just for the hell of it.

The Avengers was inviting us to explore a raffish, new Britain, a country in which class barriers were breaking down, and where tradition and pedigree had acquired something of a bad name. It was a place in which making a big splash, without necessarily having the means to pay for it, had become not just socially acceptable, but an essential goal. It was the moment that pop culture arrived. And, of course, that is what ensured that the ingeniously showy Lotus brand always carried with it a certain question mark.

The company was born in austerity Britain at the end of the 1940s, and in its first incarnation was the outcome of trying to have fun during the depths of the make-do-and-mend ethos of rationing. Everything from fresh fruit to fuel, clothing and furniture was in short supply, and baths were limited to three inches of hot water in order to save coal. Lotus cars were shaped by adversity and economy.

Where the Bentley had a Mulliner coachbuilt body in aluminium, the Elan was moulded from fibreglass. Where Bentley had built its engines itself before it was acquired by Rolls-Royce, Lotus bought in an engine block from the Ford Classic, and a steering rack from a Triumph Herald.

With its bold front hiding humble underpinnings, the Elan was a mercilessly accurate reflection of the new Britain. But the car had engineering brilliance as well as style. Lotus was able to draw on all that it had learned from building cars for the Grand Prix circuits of the world over thirty years. As a result, they were able to give the Elan the performance of an E-Type Jaguar.

The original Elan body was styled by Ron Hickman, a self-taught South African who went on to make a fortune from the patents to the Black & Decker Workbench that he designed after he left Lotus. He arrived in Britain with nothing more in the way of experience than his schoolboy sketchbooks. He worked for two years for Ford, where he quickly graduated from the clay-modelling studio to working on the new Anglia. He joined the team for Lotus’s first street car, which never managed to make money for the company. Then came the Elan project. John Frayling worked with Chapman and Hickman to get the car into production, and they were able to produce a car that was beautiful, practical, reliable and buildable. One thing was still missing: image. As a brand, Lotus simply didn’t cost enough. At just £1,200, or £25,000 in today’s money, it was within reach of the aspiring. Worse still, from the image point of view, it was available in kit form for the enthusiast. So though the finished car might from a distance look as exotic as a Cisitalia, with its semi-monocoque body, actually it was closer to the ducking-and-diving world of the DIY caravan. The Pininfarina-designed Cisitalia made it into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Elan did not. Since the Elan has more relevance to the development of the car in the second half of the twentieth century than the Cisitalia, beautiful though the latter is, the omission tells us more about MoMA’s design collection than it does about automobiles. The Cisitalia was hammered out of metal, the Elan pioneered the use of fibreglass in the car industry.

Ducking and diving is precisely the world from which Antony Colin Bruce Chapman, the Imperial College-trained engineer who established the Lotus Car Company in 1952, never quite managed to escape despite all his material success. Looking like a louche lounge lizard in his dark glasses, his Leslie Phillips toothbrush moustache and his luxuriant sideburns, Chapman built his first car - a modified Austin 7 - in a north London garage in 1948, and raced it himself. Why he called his marque ‘Lotus’ he never spelled out. But Lotus Blossom had apparently been Chapman’s pet name for the girlfriend who later became his wife. The initials inscribed on the Lotus badge, like some cricket club school blazer, are Chapman’s. The racing cars were designated with numbers - albeit skipping the less auspicious ones. There was, for example, no Lotus 13. To distance them from the circuit, Lotus’s street cars had names, all of them beginning with E, from Esprit to Eclat, by way of Elise and Europa.

From the unlikely piece of customization that was the Mark 1, Chapman went on to develop the Lotus 7, the quintessential British sports car. He sold the rights to Caterham Cars, who still manufacture its descendants to this day.

What made the Lotus project work was Chapman’s ability to think his way around the production and performance issues on which every new car depends. He wasn’t the first engineer to come up with the idea of using a space frame to make a stiff but lightweight car. Buckminster Fuller had done that decades earlier when he built his Dymaxion car back in the 1930s. While Fuller was far-sighted enough to see the potential of the approach, a fatal crash at its launch blighted the Dymaxion’s future and it was Chapman who was able to make it work in the marketplace. And the brilliant Hans Ledwinka at the Czech car company Tatra - from which FA Porsche took much of the expertise for the Volkswagen - had also worked on the idea of a ‘backbone’ chassis that shaped Lotus’s approach to finding a simple and economical way to stiffen his lightweight fibreglass bodies.

It takes a Nissan or a Ford or a Fiat to achieve the economies of scale, and the investment, that can alone build a plausible industrial car. In the last decades, the only real alternative to mass-produced cars has been the couture approach. The relationship between the runway fashion of an Yves Saint Laurent or a Christopher Bailey, and the shopping-mall Banana Republic version, is not much more distant than between a Lamborghini and a Ford. When car prices reach into seven figures, almost anything is possible. They can have specially designed, and specially made, door handles, wing mirrors and dashboards, as well as vast engines, and bodies with the qualities of sculpture. Chapman’s road-car business tried to do something else. From a starting point in the kit-building enthusiasts’ end of the spectrum, making things cheap and cheerful, he knew where to find parts that could be put to work in new and unfamiliar ways to achieve the performance that he was looking for. You might find yourself looking at an instrument gauge that recognizably came from somewhere else, or a door handle without quite the same Lotus pedigree, but it worked.

And in the end, it is this that shows why making and designing a car is not the same as making a work of art. The car designer has to work with what is available. The artist works with ideas. A close study of a car says so much about the way we live, about the way we make things, and about ourselves. It is not art, but it is the highest achievement of design, an artefact that has a greater concentration of design talent per square inch than anything else.