Design Books: Ultimate Collector Cars by Taschen

'Ultimate Collector Cars' by Taschen

Ultimate Collector Cars‘ is a lavish double-volume book by Charlotte and Peter Fiell documenting history’s one-hundred most collectable cars. It features the landmark 1903 Mercedes-Simplex 40-horsepower, the evocative 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC, iconic Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa of 1957, Bertone’s supremely glorious 1973 Lamborghini Countach and the present-day McLaren Speedtail and Aston Martin Valkyrie hypercars. Expertly researched and beautifully illustrated with archive and studio photography, Taschen’s latest book is a timely ode to the motor car as we enter the new age of the automobile. Read my interview with the authors who discuss their two-year research into this project here.

Images © ‘Ultimate Collector Cars’ by Taschen

Trends in car design from Paris

Earlier this month we attended the Paris Motor Show, one of the most important annual international exhibitions (it rotates yearly with Frankfurt). These shows are intense… they are loud, bright and pretty exhausting yet it is a great place to spot the latest trends in car design, and generally catch up on industry news.

This year most of the pavilions displayed pretty bland products – your mainstream hatchbacks, saloons and sports-utilities… and increasingly the crossover which is basically a hybrid of SUV/family car/hatchback, and whatever else the designers can incorporate. I am still waiting for a single design to inspire.

There were some concept and production cars to take note of though. On the Jaguar and Land Rover, the smaller SE Jaguar and Discovery Sport are pretty intelligent production cars coming from a car company that seems to be going from strength to strength.

Elsewhere, we loved the stylish Superleggera Vision Concept on the Mini stand (read our interview with Adrian Van Hooydonk, BMW Group’s design director here).

Here are our highlights from the show which appeared in Wallpaper*.

 

Nargess Shahmanesh Banks

Design Talks | 5 – 25 Scrutton Street | Old Street | Shoreditch | London | EC2A 4HJ?W | UK | www.d-talks.com | Bookshop www.d-talks.com/bookshop | Published by Banksthomas

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Trend spotting at the Geneva Motor Show

The Geneva Motor Show is a great place for spotting new design and technology trends within the car industry. There never of course is a single direction but you can get a general sense of what  to expect in the new few years. Read the full reports in Future Space Magazine and in Wallpaper*

BMW_empty stage

Also have a look at some of the designer interviews from previous Geneva Motor Shows.

Design Talks | 5 – 25 Scrutton Street | Old Street | Shoreditch | London | EC2A 4HJ?W | UK 
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Learning from manga

The former BMW design director Chris Bangle once told me he believes at times form needs to follow fantasy. ‘For the future of car design, function is the last refuge of the unimaginative,’ he concluded. The Japanese are masters of fantasy – reflected through their imaginative, virtual worlds of animation and comics, anime and manga. Bangle may have said this to ruffle the stiff collars of the automotive world, but can car design learn from this, and is it right to assume that with clean car design, it makes good sense to reference such a futuristic, fantasy world?

Felipe Roo Clefas seems to thinks it does. The Belgium designer, who works in London at Nissan Design Europe, has an almost visceral connection to the clean graphics, the intricately designed machinery and robots, and the narrative that makes anime almost believable.

When asked to lead the project team for the Terranaut concept, Roo Clefas almost gave the car a science fiction narrative. ‘The story is most important in anime and with this I created believable fantasy,’ he says. The 3D user interface in the car references the anime Ghost in the Shell. ‘I see more of this 3D interaction happening in the next five to six years,’ he adds.

François Bancon believes the young have a different sense of reality. ‘They interface with the world through the computer,’ says the general manager at Nissan and Infiniti’s Advanced Design studio in Japan. ‘They are no longer interested in products but in experiences.’

Bancon works with an international team in the Yokohama studio penning the next-generation of Nissan and Infiniti cars. He believes anime and manga’s stylised graphics and fascination with the virtual world is having a major impact on how the emerging generation of car designers are approaching the profession.

One of his team members Eunsun Yoo admits that depending on the given project, anime and manga have philosophically influenced her work. She recalls the Nissan Mixim scheme where its interior was conceptually rooted in computer games, and visually connected to anime and manga. ‘It was more of a philosophical than a physical influence. It was about having no boundaries between the real and the virtual world,’ says the Korean designer, adding that her generation – she is 29 – who were raised on computer games and Second Life see no margins between the virtual and the real worlds.

The Mixim cabin is blatantly futuristic and also influenced by Ghost in the Shell. ‘The Mixim like Ghost isn’t a utopian future, but a little bit dark,’ she explains. ‘This was a car aimed at a young future generation and therefore I worked on the idea of how to blur the boundaries. The centre-positioned driver seat is F1 and computer game inspired, as is the steering wheel, and the control panels.’

redefining beauty

Many of the new generation of car designers, especially those coming from Asia, have a different concept of beauty that isn’t necessarily rooted in classical proportions. ‘To them beauty isn’t just about looking like a Jaguar E-Type, but a sense of proportion multiplied by features,’ observes Victor Nacif who heads the multi-national Nissan design team in Europe. He admits that the fashion is predominantly led by Asian themes and Japanese designers who tend to have a different notion of beauty.

Kimberly Wu says she has always been inspired by traditional and contemporary illustration of anime and manga. A transport design graduate of the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, she now works at Honda’s California advanced design studio where they conceive future, mainly green cars.

‘To me, anime is an idealised fantasy version of reality,’ she explains. ‘With body parts pulled, stretched and exaggerated, these characters hardly resemble real men and women. Yet, one cannot deny a certain appeal in the doll-like figures. In some respect, car design follows in the same formula: we pull lines, stretch form and exaggerate wheels – all for the sake of a sexier proportion.’

Her former tutor Bumsuk Lim says that many younger car designers are exploring ways in which to translate the extreme emotional expression found in anime and manga to a real-world product like the car. Electric cars open the possibility to add expression to the front-end. With only minimum openings required to cool the engine, affectively you are left with a large blank canvas to project a new face for the car. This, and sophisticated lighting technology, creates endless possibilities for designers to create new expressions.

Lim agrees the connection between the two makes particular sense as we enter the second phase of the automobile. ‘This virtual reality world ties in with what car designers are doing with the green movement, creating their own fantasy world,’ he explains. With the mechanical part – as in the engine – no longer the sole fascination, the next generation of the automobile can affectively be any shape it chooses to be.

One of his students James Chung recently created a city car with a cute face visibly inspired by anime. ‘It proves that an electric car can be any shape. The concept of the automobile as a machine will change to the concept of automobile as a device. And a device can have any look,’ he says. ‘I tell my students this is the best time to be a designer.”

But is this all limited to Asian carmakers? On the whole yes but there are designers like Luc Donckerwolke who have always loved manga. ‘I came to car design from the cartoon world,’ says the Seat design director who previously headed Lamborghini design where he was responsible for such cars as the 2002 Murciélago, the 2004 Gallardo and helped pen the Miura show car.

Donckerwolke notes that the car to him is like a manga caricature in that you have to capture the essence of the person’s face with just three simple lines. ‘With my cars too when I close my eyes I want to have a clear architecture of how the eyebrows are, how the muscles are.’ Donckerwolke even leads a double life as a cartoonist. ‘I am a virtual chief designer in the comic and the real world,’ he muses.

According to Bancon this language has no national barriers anymore. ‘It may have originated from Japan but it’s now a global vocabulary.’

Nargess Shahmanesh Banks

I originally wrote an article on a similar theme ‘Manga Cars’ for Esquire which appeared in the November 2010 edition.

Design Talks | 5 – 25 Scrutton Street | Old Street | Shoreditch | London | EC2A 4HJ?W | UK | www.d-talks.com | Bookshop www.d-talks.com/bookshop | Published by Banksthomas

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Social art: The Dream Factory

Should creativity be socially responsible? The Dream Factory thinks so. The collection of pioneering artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, thinkers and social entrepreneurs believe that you can impact on the world by enhancing communities and raising social consciousness through creativity.

Art Against knives

Sponsored by Japanese carmaker Honda, the collective was born in May with an initial exhibition held at The Dray Walk Gallery on London’s Brick Lane. The exhibition will progress into an annual event alongside a series of eclectic shows and workshops running throughout the country. For more on future events visit the Dream Factory.

DT met with some of the so called ‘cultural engineers’…

Art Against Knives

‘Our aim is to set-up Our Space, a place designed, built and sustained by disadvantaged youth in East London,’ explains Art Against Knives co-founder Katy Dawe. ‘The area is developing at a fast rate and we feel there is little contact with the local community. We want to bridge this gap.’

The initiative was started in 2009 following a horrific knife attack on co-founder Oliver Hemsley a year earlier that left the 22 year old confined to a wheelchair. Dawe then organised a fundraising event for friends and fellow Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design students which grabbed the attention of local art and fashion heavyweights who donated artwork to the exhibition and auction.

Art Against knives

What started as raising awareness on knife crime has since evolved. The non-profit organisation is currently working on a number of initiatives within the art world – including collaborating with Open Shorditch, a coalition of local businesses and residents. ‘We will do mentorships so that anyone interested in the arts can gain an insight into the industry and perhaps it can lead to job opportunities,’ Dawe enthuses. The team will shortly be running workshops and are aiming to open their first Our Space in April. ‘The project is like a net – the corners eventually coming together to form a square.’

Benedict Radcliffe

Benedict Radcliffe creates intricate life-size wire frame models of supercars and graffiti-bikes. An architecture graduate from the Glasgow School of Art, he learnt his skills more or less whilst working at an architect firm in Scotland. ‘I learnt to fabricate techniques such as railings and spiral staircases so much so that cutting-edge projects were sent my way,’ he says.

Benedict Radcliffe's Lamborghini sculpture

Radcliffe works with any subject that interests him including an ‘Air Sculpture Garden’ for Nike – a vertical garden complete with a giant, 3D wire shoe. The artist admits he doesn’t intentionally set out with a social message, but such projects as his pedal-powered Lamborghini makes a clear ironic statement. ‘It was also about having fun,’ he says.

ColaLife

ColaLife founder Simon Berry has come up with a simple solution to help tackle child mortality in some of the more remote regions of Africa. The ColaLife concept is simple. ‘You can find Coca-Cola anywhere in Africa,’ he explains. By utilising Coke’s distribution networks, sachets of re-hydration salts and other urgent medical products can be transported in ‘Aid Pods’ designed to fit into the unused wedge space between the necks of Coke bottles and the crates.

ColaLife in Colombo © Simon Berry

The initial idea came to Berry when he was a development worker in Zambia in 1988. Then, one in five children died before the age of five, often from mere diarrhoea preventable with a simple dose of re-hydration salts – the mortality figure remain the same today.

Berry is now in talks with Coca-Cola to trial the scheme. ‘We want to distribute this to very remote areas starting in Africa – the aim being for it to be eventually taken on by local organisations.’

Heritage Orchestra

Heritage Orchestra collaborate with traditional and experimental artists from the world of art and music to encourage work that they hope engages the public by being relevant and reflecting the zeitgeist. Their mission is to reinvent the orchestra to express modern Britain.

‘Our ultimate aim is to be a different type of orchestra,’ explains artistic director Chris Wheeler. ‘We have a traditional set-up, and the instruments are the same, but our mind is set in the future. We want to be a modern orchestra and be open to new ideas and technology.’

Nargess Shahmanesh Banks

Design Talks | 5 – 25 Scrutton Street | Old Street | Shoreditch | London | EC2A 4HJ?W | www.d-talks.com | Bookshopwww.d-talks.com/bookshop | Published by Banksthomas

All rights and labelled images are covered by ©