Tomorrow's car is taking shape now in Pasadena
Southern California is no place to counsel moderation, least of all when it comes to the buying, selling or driving of automobiles. Many people here feel about their cars the way the rest of us do about our reputations--without the right one they may as well pack up and slink away.
Given the area's infatuation with four-wheeled vehicles, it should come as no great surprise that the bottom half of the state has recently become an important outpost for the automotive industry. Manufacturers from Japan and Detroit have established branches here to pick up on tastes they believe predate trends in the rest of the world by as much as a decade. Designers in these "advanced concept studios." are charged with sorting through these California notions, mixing them with their own and translating the resulting ideas into deisgns for tomorrow's production cars. The studios are small, but they are staffed with some of the best minds in the business. And though these mostly young, freewheeling designers may differ radically in approach and outlook, most do have one thing in common: four years of hard work at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Perched high on a hill overlooking the San Gabriel Mountains, Art Center is a stone's throw from the Rose Bowl but light-years from Detroit. Yet it is the training ground for more than half of that city's automobile designers. Every year recruiters from Detroit's Big Three automakers flock here to vie for the two dozen or so graduates of the school's transportation design program. The competition for students is stiff: many graduates join the more glamorous ranks of Porsche, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and other European manufacturers, where they are very welcome. As one representative of a French automobile company put it: "If I could fire all my designers and replace them with only Art Center graduates, I would."
Auto companies do not wait for graduation to get involved with the student, however. They frequently invite the students to take part in design explorations, in which a company presents a basic idea and the students take a semester to develop it. In a typical project, designers from the company will visit the class three times during a semester, offering suggestions and, more important, giving the students the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with professionals. All three major American carmakers have participated in these projects, as have SAAB and Volkswagen.
The Art Center school was founded 54 years ago by Edward (Tink) Adams, a harried New York art director who came West in search of rest and relaxation. He never found it. Instead, he and a group of like-minded friends pooled their resources to establish a school that would teach al aspects of design, an art they believed was taken all too lightly by existing institutions of higher learning. since then the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and the Royal College of Art in London have begun similar programs, as have a number of universities.
Art Center has come a long way since those early days when, legend has it, founders pawned their cars to pay the rent on the handful of studios the school occupied near downtown Los Angeles. Today 200 full- and part-time faculty teach 1,200 full-time students in a gleaming steel-and-glass structure built in 1976 at a cost of $9 million.
The curriculum, too, is expansive. It includes six major areas: communications design (as in advertising), fine arts, illustration, photography, film and industrial design. The transportation design program, part of the industrial design department, was set up just after World War II. The first director, an Art Center graduate with a dozen years' experience in Detroit, believed that design was to be learned at the drawing board, not in the library. Theory is still kept to a minimum here. Required courses are crammed in during the evening after a full day in the studio, and homework is rarely done until dark. All-night dashes to meet deadlines are not unknown. Indeed, most people rushing around Art Center, portfolios in one hand, forgotten cigarettes in the other, seem to teeter on a fine line between exuberance and exhaustion.
"The point is not to run this place like a boot camp, but to teach students to allocate their time and energy in a professional man who has been president of Art Center since 1969. "Industrial design, particularly in the automobile industry, is getting very competitive, and we want students to be able to make a smotth transition into the working world with no illusions about what's ahead."
Art Center transportation design student may have no illusions, but they have plenty of dreams. Unlike many of the illustration, photography and fine arts majors who prance from class to class in high-fashion clothes and designer shoes, the "trans" students, usually in T-shirts and jeans, appear downright convervative. But their drawings, models and ideas quickly belie this impression.
Restraining a passion for motorized vehicles
"To be a car designer you've got to have 40-weight oil in your blood," says Brian Baker, a 23-year-old senior from Indianapolis. "We're a hybrid of artist and engineer, but we have something you don't find in either one of those professions: we try hard to put the feeling people get out of driving a car into the design, a kid of personality that could never be preprogrammed."
Baker has joined a few other transportation majors for dinner to chat about new directions in automobile design. All of the students admit to a passion for motorized vehicles, a pssion they're demonstrated since early childhood when they found themselves sketching trains, airplanes and automobiles instead of snowmen and flowers in elementary school art classes.
"Most of us are so enthusiastic about what we do that we have to restrain ourselves from designing family cars that look like formula-one racing cars," laughs Lloyd Walker, a 23-year-old from Kansas City. "Little spaceships for the road are lots of fun, but they are not responsible design."
Although the student agree that appearance is often what ultimately sells a buyer on an automobile, they insist that other factors, such as safety and comfort, are more important design concerns. Gone are the days when designers were merely stylists who could commit their fantasies to paper and expect the engineering department to make them a reality. The Art Center philosophy has always been to put sound engineering principles ahead of fashion, and today that traidition is more important than ever.
"My father's generation grew up driving thundering, rolling airships for the road," says Baker. "But this generation has a lot more technical savvy. The electronics boom, the space race, even the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit are influences no other generation has had. And the people we'll be designing for--kids 15 years younger than ourselves--they're technology junkies. They want the ultimate in everything: fingertip controls, instrument panels instead of dashboards--almost like videogames you can drive."
But Eric Schumaker, a 20-year-old, third-year "trans" major from Detroit, says that this obsession with hightech gadgetry is a fad headed for the same fate as the tail fins and heavy chrome of the '50s. "You can't play videogames while you're cruising down the freeway," he says. "We have to refrain from putting too many gimmicks on a car, like digital dashboards and computer-assisted everything. That's not honest design."
Talking to these and other Art Center students, one quickly gets the correct impression that they are not your average bunch of undergraduates. In fact, most entrants have at least two years of college behind them, and nearly a quarter have bachelor's degrees. An annual tuition, of $6,165, which does not include materials charges that hover close to $1,000 per semester, keeps the less serious away, as does the requirement that all candidates submit a portfolio of drawings and conceptual work. There are very few dilettantes at Art Center, and not one who makes it through the transportation design curriculum.
"No one wants to pay you a dime or give you an inch of space to design today's cars. You've got to think ahead of current expectations!" So says instructor Harry Bradley to a roomful of fourth- and fifth-semester designers who have gathered to have their ideas ripped apart by his no-holds-barred critique. Bradley, a successful independent designer, has built custom cars for movie stars as well as consulted for major automobile manufacturers the world over. He learned the business the hard way, working in studios at General Motors in the 1960s when the political and economic climate was anything but conducive to innovative design. He migrated to Southern California where he took a job designing the original line of toy model cars known as Hot Wheels. From there it was on to his own business, and a one-day-a-week teaching job at Art Center, where his specialty seems to be deflating swelled heads, while at the same time inspiring student to go beyond what they had considered their best.
"You are using cliches in a way that doesn't communicate anything," he cautions one young man, whose skectches are taped for all to see on the classroom walls. "If you continue to draw this way you will experience a constant gnawing away inside that will eventually betray you." And to another student: "You can fool a lot of people a lot of the time if you draw this well. Your ability, which is great, will haunt you your entire career. Drawing like this look very good on paper, but when you try to model them you get nothing. That's how we got the 1971 Eldorado. It looked great on paper, but we all know what it looks like on the road."
The students sit on backless stools, their legs twisted uncomfortably, their hands fiddling with one or two of the dozens of felt-tipped markers--some in old beer six-packs, some in more formal carriers--that are the most important tools of their trade. A few, who know their designs are below par, bow their heads as Bradley points out error after error. Others, more sure of themselves, argue vigorously, explaining the rationale behind what the instructor soon convinces them was a less than ideal design decision. Such mistakes range from shading in a car window with black ink ("There is no such things as pure black or pure white--this looks like some Darth Vader reflection") to mismatching the front and rear ends of the car. By the time students graduate from Bradley's class, their pens no longer betray them as wishful thinkers or, worse still, charlatans. Their designs will have become as workable as they are attractive.
In another studio class, this one a bit more advanced, students are given full rein to let their imaginations fly on a variety of projects ranging from a "manned orbital transfer vehicle" designed to carry satellites and serve as a sort of tugboat in space, to a much more down-to-earth but still very high-tech motorcycle. The idea is to be as innovative as possible, while keeping basic principles of ergonomics, safety and efficiency firmly in mind.
"My feeling is that 90 percent of all cars are driven with only one person inside," says Orrin Shively, a 24-year-old student from London. This belief has led Shively to depart radically from convention with an "urban vehicle" that accommodates no more than two people comfortably at a cruising around people, it envelops them," he explains. "American cars are still terrible in the way they treat the driver; the French, for example, are much more concerned with driver comfort. This design is closest to a Citroen." Designed for maximum maneuverability, Shively's car can steer with its rear wheels to edge into tight parking spaces, and has doors that slide back to allow easy exits onto too-close curbs. It is a playful, youthful design, yet surprisingly practical.
Across the room, David Weise, 26, fith-term student from Hamilton, Ontario, Fleshes out his drawing of a new-wave police car. Most police cars are stock production vehicles converted with a paint job, an upgraded suspension and engine, and a string of lights. Weise's model integrates features that police want.
"This car is built for cops from the bottom up," explains the burly six-footer. Oddly, no police car on today's market is bulletproof. Weise put bulletproof Lexan plasic into his car's windows and windshield and bulletproof Kevlar into its door panels. He built a roll cage into the body and uprights on the bumpers to ease crashes through all kinds of barriers and for pushing other vehicles. The front seat is enlarged slightly to ensure comfort for the officers, and the rear passenger compartment has a steel bar for clipping handcuffs, but no door handles. The warning lights are built into the roof, which is a bit higher than average to make room for tall policemen wearing hats. And the whole package is relatively lightweight, turns on a dime and gets better-than-average gas mileage. It's a design most police departments would covet. But instructor Keith Teter, head of the transportation design program, is not yet sold. "It still looks too much like a production car," he mutters. "It hasn't quite taken that final leap out of the genre."
A 1957 graduate of the college, Teter worked at the Ford Motor Company for 12 years and headed the teams that designed some of that company's biggest sellers, including the Mustang, the Maverick and the Mach I, before returning as head of Art Center's industrial design department in 1969. A self-confessed car freak, he owns nine classic automobiles, and photographs and models of these and otehr cars are the only distractions in his otherwise stark office. Teter is adamant that student reach far beyond the obvious in their pursuit of better design. Boring cars, as epitomized by what he calls the "econobox" subcompacts popularized a few years back, have no place on his or his students' drawing boards. But neither do pie-in-the-sky renderings that have nothing to do with the realities of the marketplace.
"We don't want our students building cars like tract houses," Teter says. "We encourage them to think into the future, to be really creative while letting them know the hard facts of building and selling in volume. We teach them responsibility but also not to be timid.
"Good engineering means good design," Teter continues. "The design opportunities created by technology over the past 20 years have really improved the look of cars." And the number-one influence in both design and engineering, he says, has been the application of aerodynamics, a concern brought on not by any considered corporate philosophy but by the mid-1970s oil crunch.
In stop-and-go driving at less than 20 miles per hour, fuel consumption is primarily determined by vehicular weight. But on the highway, air resistance becomes a critical factor. At 55 miles per hour, a conventional family car uses approximately 65 percent of its horsepower and 60 percent of its fuel just in overcoming air resistance. Detroit recognized the importance of decreasing drag only in the past ten years or so, and General Motors is so far the only Big Three company to install an on-site wind tunnel for testing the aerodynamics of full-scale vehicles. But European automakers--particularly Pininfarina SpA, the half-century-old company responsible for the Ferrari and designs used by Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and Rolls-Royce--have long attended to this factor. So has Art Center, whose students use a wind tunnel run by the California Institute of Technology.
Striving toward the clean, uncluttered look
The move toward minimum wind resistance has vindicated designers who for decades have fought the marketing departments' demands for such wind-catching embellishments as fancy grilles, fins and hood ornaments. Art Center is very much in the forefront of this minimal-frill tradition, and none of the young designers here has any interest in ornamentation. Pininfarina is the ideal, and the supersleek, low-slung designs that fill classroom walls and galleries attest to the students' loyalty to the no-nonsense school of automotive design that calls for simple, clean, uncluttered "rolling sculptures."
"Im a purist, I like a minimum of character lines on a car," says Freeman Thomas, a 26-year-old designer for Porsche who was one of the top students last year. "Porsches are timeless because they don't rely on lines--they're all shape."
Thomas, known not only for his design savvy but for his habit of listening to the track sound of Daytona Raceway through tape-recorder headphones as he sketches, is one of a new breed of "global" designers who will, many predict, dictate the shape of cars in the future. While it once was assumed that the French would buy French-built cars, the Germans, German-built, and the Americans, American-built, today's automakers have no such guarantees. Ten years ago almost all Art Center transportation graduates went to Detroit. Now they can be found from Spain to Indonesia and jsut about all points in between. In fact, head designers at Volvo in Sweden, Porsche in Germany, and Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Honda in Japan are all Art Center products.
Competition from Europe and Japan as well as the increased cost of fuel has caused American carmakers to totally rethink their products. This, Art Center faculty and student agree, is all to the good. It has led, they say, to a more rational approach in American design. While auto design in this country used to be considered a necessary evil and was dominated by an overpowering marketing department, in the last decade or so it has become an integral part of a new car's conceptualization. This has resulted in smaller, better-built automobiles with cleaner lines, better fuel efficiency and fewer frills. It has not, however, resulted in a major change in thinking that will launch American automobile design into a new orbit all its own.
"Car design is an evolutionary business," explains Teter. "Wheels aren't going to disappear overnight, and you won't wee electric cars replacing the internal combustion engine in the near future. How can you revolutionize a product when the essential problem--that of putting people in a pod and moving them from one place to another--remains the same? This is a business of microrevolutions. There has never been an open-checkbook policy in the auto industry the way there was in the space program; no one has ever said, 'Take that car and get it to the moon!'"
After a week at Art Center, though, one gets the feeling that if that project were ever undertaken, it would get its start here.