Form versus function
Brian Sewell
AUTOMOBILES BY ARCHITECTS by Ivan Margolius Wiley-Academy, £27.50, pp. 160 How rare it is to put down a book with the sense of pleasure satisfied, the mind excited by ideas and information, nostalgia stimulated, the eye amused by illustrations — all this by a book that is not a hand- somely bound biography or history, but a substantial paperback on the part played by architects in the design of motor cars and other vehicles, absurdity as much a con- stant lurking presence as intelligence. Only an architect could have proposed a truck with a chassis made of ferro-concrete (though Turkish fishing boats are occasion- ally constructed of cement on an armature of chicken-wire); and only an architect, Buckminster Fuller, could have designed a tear-drop three-wheeler six metres long, all power and steering the responsibility of the single rear wheel, without realising that at speed its controllability might be in doubt — as it was, for at 50 mph the rear wheel left the ground and the car lost traction, braking and steering.
Not all architects were quite so dotty, Emett and Heath Robinson. They debated what are now the age-old questions of form versus function, of the car as sculp- ture, the car as an extension of the house and the house, in mass production princi- ples, as an extension of the car; and if Lutyens saw the limousine as an ornate 18th-century carriage genuinely horseless, but conceding nothing to the engineer and the engine God knows where, and Jan Kaplicky conceived the Media Centre of Lord's cricket ground in much the same form as he might the nose-cone of an Fl racing car, there are many rather less out- rageous notions in between — indeed, the surprise is to discover how conventional, hesitant, tentative and of their immediate time most architects were when out of their design element. Corbusier's `Voiture Minimum', the grotesque wooden model so often exhibited as a work of art to induce a gasp of awe, was conceived in 1928 but in gestation until 1936, by which time it had become an impractical varia- tion of Ferdinand Porsche's pattern for the first Volkswagen, itself very close to Ledwinka's designs for Tatra and the Zbrojovska Z6 of 1935 — in other words, central European zeitgeist inspired this awkward, ugly car, fit only for a pair of Quasimodos, not the muse of architecture.
When Walter Gropius designed bodies for Adler in 1930, his coupes and limous- ines were wholly in the international idiom of the day, long, high and angular, distin- guishable only in detail from French, British and American designs by engineers. The form of Frank Lloyd Wright's 1920 drawings for a four-door open car could have been applied to any 12-foot chassis of the day, and when, 20 years later, he bought a Lincoln Continental Cabriolet, a wonder- fully streamlined car for its time, he remod- elled it as a sedanca with semi-circular windows — a boulevardier body that con- tradicted all aerodynamic practice, whether scientific or stylish, and hell to drive at speed. Nothing that Norman Bel Geddes designed was half as practical or beautiful as the shark-like bodies built in-house by Cord; and all that can be said for Gino Ponti's proposal for an Alfa Romeo family saloon in 1952 is that it achieved its apotheosis 30 years later in the hideous and ill-fated Austin Ambassador. Archi- tects and artists made and make marvel- lously confident theorists when discussing cars, but in practice prove themselves as arrogant and impractical in this field as in their own; Philippe Starck made a motor- cycle pretty and Kaplicky constructed a tear-drop caravan of such sculptural inge- nuity that one can forgive its near-useless- ness as accommodation, but that is all. When architects turned their hands to the working parts of the car they made abso- lute fools of themselves — Buckminster Fuller's idea of an economy car was essen- tially a three-wheeler tear-drop shorter than a Mini, but each wheel was in fact a pair of wheels driven by a tiny air-cooled radial five-cylinder engine, the driver switching on one, two or three engines according to the performance required; when the cost of such complex miniature engineering was borne in on him, he pro- posed the use of three gas turbines instead of three petrol engines.
Turning the pages of this engrossing book, the reader can only conclude that, paraphrasing Peter Behrens, architects as car designers achieved neither mastery of the practical nor the art of the beautiful, and played no significant part in the first 100 years of motoring history.
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