Retro Design: 2002-07 Ford Thunderbird (in progress)
The success of any new car hinges largely on the novelty of its design. Visually, it must somehow differ from its predecessors in order to catch the eye, stir passions, and stoke desires. Like a newspaper or novel, a car becomes less interesting and exciting once you have read it. So car designers, like journalists and novelists, are necessarily caught up in an incessant cycle of coming up with the “next new thing.”
So why should retro design themes—like those of the Porsche Boxster, Chrysler’s PT Cruiser and Prowler, Volkswagen’s New Beetle, and the revived Mini—appeal so much? What did Ford hope to gain with a new T-Bird that reminded us of old T-Birds?
Nostalgia, that “bittersweet longing for revered things of the past,” is the easy answer. But the complete answer has an ironic twist: A retro theme can be so old that it seems refreshingly new and unfamiliar; but, at the same time, it seems comfortably familiar. Retro themes provide simultaneous doses of psychic tension, due to novelty, and psychic comfort due to familiarity. The most appealing new shoes are comfortable enough to remind us of our old shoes.
Retro also has purely practical implications. Coming up with something truly original, that doesn’t remind viewers of what’s already out there, is the most demanding aspect of any creative endeavor, be it literature, painting, music or car design. Responding to the same operative trends, designers at different companies are likely to come up with designs that look much alike. Just ask any designer. Just ask any car buyer trying to find a car that’s truly unique.
Solving this problem by reaching back for a look that is so old that it’s new is as old as art and design themselves. As the fashion industry learned eons ago, recycling themes is the simplest way to continually come up with something “new.”
As a bonus, Ford’s T-Bird heritage provided an exclusive preserve for its designers to explore. Just as only Volkswagen dared to recreate the Beetle, no one else had license, in effect, to emulate the T-Bird. Exercising their license guaranteed Ford a relatively unique design that others weren’t inclined to copy.
The exterior design satisfied the primary aesthetic condition of newness by differing enough from the competition to stand out. Neither did it slavishly copy the earlier Birds that inspired it.
Some details, like the grille and headlights, brought to mind the first-generation 1955-57 T-Bird. The circular elements surrounding the fog lights were meant to evoke the tubular bumper guards of the original. But their flattened form bothered me because they seemed cheap and toy-like.
The third-generation 1961-63 T-Bird inspired it more. Fortunately, designers chose to emulate the ‘61 windshield rather than the wraparound version of the first Bird. It is more compatible with the new design. And it lends some visual speed and boldness to the design.
The headlights of the new model, which seem at first to have nothing in common with earlier themes, amount to perhaps the cleverest visual bridge to the original. You can see on close examination that the original’s headlights were also set into oval openings. By flipping one and rotating it just so, you can see the visual similarities of the old and new designs. [Fig. 4]
A Proper Soul
Foremost among all means for making a car seem normal and appropriate, it must seem alive—as though it has a soul. Next to finding an original theme, conjuring just the right soul for a car taxes the creative and aesthetic skills of a designer more than any other task.
If you are to love a car, it must have a proper, respectable soul. This means that, among other things, it should seem active, as though it is making its way through the environment, not succumbing to it. It should seem agile, too, not awkward. An SUV must seem especially robust. We expect a sports car to seem fast and aggressive.
The new T-Bird seems alive and agile. It also seems fast. But we could hardly call it aggressive. True to its heritage, it is a special kind of sports car—a charming boulevardier rather than a testosterone-charged sprinter like the Viper. It visually slips bird-like through the air rather than brusquely forcing its way.
Its profile sets the tone and, in fact, accounts for much of the car’s so-old-it’s-new novelty. Like its predecessors, it echoes classic airplane-inspired forms—the teardrop and the airfoil—that preceded the modern rocket-inspired wedge. [Fig. 1] It shares this older theme with only a few of today’s cars, including the Porsche 911. Unlike the high-tailing Corvette, the high point of its fender profile lies far forward, near the windshield, more like the ‘61 Bird’s. The ‘55 Bird’s profile crested so far forward that it virtually defined a backwards wedge.
Clichés
At the other extreme of creative effort, cliches provide the easiest way to make a design seem normal. No designer wants to be associated with clichés, but they all are—out of necessity. Cliches are habits, like walking and brushing teeth, that a designer uses automatically without thinking. Indeed, it is hard for a designer to not use clichés because they come to mind so readily. Like other habits, clichés conserve brainpower. It is impractical or impossible to think through the reasons behind every last detail in order to justify its form on functional, economic, or other respectable grounds. If you had to think about walking or designing every last detail, you couldn’t pay attention to more pressing matters. There are limits, of course. No one appreciates lazy designers who ponders nothing and uses only cliches to end up with designs that are utterly predictable and commonplace.
Clichés ease the viewer’s task, too, because they are so predictable. When a novel starts out with “It was a dark and stormy night,” the reader knows pretty much what to expect. Predictably, the new T-Bird has cast wheels with spokes instead of wheels more reminiscent of hub-capped wheels common during the 1950s and 1960s.
Clichés have limited lifetimes. The first three generations of T-Birds featured a popular cliché in the form of skirts that hid much of their rear wheels. Skirts were so commonplace in the 1950s that designers hardly dared to exclude them from their designs. This was especially true of the 1955 when the first T-Bird arrived.
Skirts would have built another retro bridge between old and new Birds. [Fig. 2] They would have also brought the bonus of additional novelty (only the Honda Insight has them today). But the would have been in direct conflict with more contemporary clichés—those cast wheels and the open wheel wells needed to see them. Skirts might seem more appropriate—and attractive—if you happen to know that they can reduce air drag by as much as 10 percent (the reason the Insight and speed-record cars have them).
Concinnity
A quality I call objective concinnity constitutes the most basic way of ensuring that a car’s design seems appropriate. Concinnity comes from an Old Latin word meaning “a skillful arrangement of parts.” The uniform gaps and aligned panels of good fit and finish are about concinnity. So are parallel lines and right angles. Regardless of an appropriate soul warm appeals to nostalgia, a car with poor fit and finish blows it aesthetically.
Most dictionaries equate concinnity with harmony, symmetry, and elegance: Harmony involves regularity, repetition, and proportion. Symmetry involves reflected repetition. Elegance involves an absence of complexity and excess. I call it objective concinnity because, unlike such subjective matters as soul and nostalgia, we can measure it objectively with rulers, protractors, and other instruments.
[Fig. 1] Some examples of concinnity are obvious in the side view of the T-Bird. The curve of the A-pillar (A) lines up with one of the front wheel’s spokes and passes through the wheel’s center. This curve is also symmetrical with the rear profile of the top (B), which is, in turn, parallel with the tail. The rear edge of the door is aligned with the center of the porthole and the transition between upper and rear surfaces of the top. (I can’t vouch for the precision of these observations, of course, because they are subject to the distortions of perspective in the photo. In any case, it’s what seems to be so the counts.)
One of the most remarkable and unusual examples of symmetry occurs in the virtual identity of the headlights and taillights. Their lenses (E & F) are symmetrical; so are the elliptical recesses holding the lights (G & H). Finally, note that the small chrome elements in the fender “vent” are perpendicular to the A-pillar.
Unlike clichés, which come and go over time, objective concinnity is timeless; once a car is designed, it neither gains nor loses its original share. Consequently, it is associated with the appeal of lasting beauty. All timeless classics have it in abundance.
A car can have too much objective concinnity. Symmetry could be carried to such extremes, for example, that the front and rear ends of the car would be virtually identical. [Fig. 3] Whereas left-right symmetry of a car’s front or rear view is OK, fore and aft symmetry would slow the car visually to a halt because the impression of movement requires asymmetry. The result would be a serious loss of soul.
In the final analysis, the new T-Bird has enough modern clichés to stay in step with the times and remain appealing over the near term. Its nostalgic references to the highly regarded early Birds ensures a relatively indefinite appeal. Its appropriate soul guarantees even more lasting appeal. An ample amount of objective concinnity suggests that it will have relatively timeless appeal. Only time will tell, however, whether it has enough to earn classic status.
Lamborghini Gallardo
One critic summed up the Gallardo’s design as “too pure.” Since that would be high praise in almost any other quarter, I will concentrate on the concept of purity in my assessment of the Gallardo’s design.
The design of any car begins and ends in a quest for just the right blend of refined purity and an emotionally charged diabolic impression (“diabolic” happens to be an antonyms of “pure”). Purity leads to a sense of neatness, harmony, and elegance, which I refer to simply as concinnity. While a car’s diabolic essence is responsible for its visual energy, vitality and soul, some degree of concinnity is essential if a car is ever to become a timeless classic. A designer has considerable latitude, however, in the relative mixture. On a pure-diabolic scale, the relatively refined Lamborghini Miura would lie near the pure end, for example, while the more energetic Lamborghini Diablo would lie, fittingly so, near the diabolic end .
The Gallardo’s supercar cues—an extremely low, sweeping, cab-forward profile dominated by a windshield more horizontal than vertical and a high, blunt tail; a wide, agile stance; robust wheels and tires; scoops and vents for handling gobs of air—provide plenty of diabolic character. Rather than embellishing it with noisy Diablo-like details, design chief Luc Donckerwolke favored such classic Lambos as the Miura that lay nearer to the pure end of the scale. He and his staff struck a beautiful balance in my opinion, in creating the most beautiful Lamborghini ever. But some enthusiasts who identify Lamborghini primarily with more ornery models like the Countach and Diablo were bound to think the former Audi designer had pushed matters too far, with a critical loss of Italian character.
The car certainly brings to mind notions of purity: “unadulterated”; “free of inappropriate or extraneous elements”; “free from discordant qualities.” Specifically, any of the following attributes, orientations, and relationships among design elements contribute to a sense of purity:
• attributes of continuity, repetition, simplicity, symmetry, and unity;
• orientations that are horizontal, and vertical.
• relationships that are aligned, concentric, contiguous, flush, intersecting (of more than two lines or of a line and center of a circle), orthogonal (perpendicular), and parallel.
These properties are associated with the more general concept I call objective concinnity. Many seem redundant because they stem from common roots. Symmetry (literally “same measure”) is a special kind of repetition. The Gallardo’s flush headlight covers are also aligned and continuous with the hood’s surface. Integrated, body-colored bumpers unify its design and make it seem simpler than if it had distinct black or chrome bumpers. The virtually concentric circles of its wheels and their body openings are essentially parallel. In a nutshell, these properties yield discernible patterns that decrease the mental effort required to perceive the design and file it in memory. The ease of the process feels good for the same reason that a flash of insight does. You don’t have to be conscious of the patterns to reap their rewards. Neither did the designers. Intuition is sufficient.
Designers can revitalize a too-pure design by reversing the purification process: by decreasing continuity, repetition, continuity, and alignment; by increasing complexity; by distorting right angle and parallel relationships; upsetting horizontal and vertical orientations. To end up with a design that is both pure enough and exciting enough, designers must fit each disruption into a new pattern as pure as the one it displaces. Otherwise, the design could become a chaotic, jumbled mess; disturbing more than exciting.
Up front, factors that promote purity (in italics for emphasis) include parallel edges, creases, and fillets of the bumper and air dam running horizontally. Flush headlight covers are aligned and contiguous with the bumper seam and sides of the hood.
Disruptions of such regularities constitute diabolic factors. They attract more attention and provoke more emotional excitement because they are relatively unexpected: Instead of running parallel to the windshield’s continuous sweep, the hood’s rear edge has a discontinuity (A). A sharply carved crease (B) runs haphazardly across the hood. The top of the otherwise orthogonal grille in the bumper (C) breaks at a rakish angle. The headlight cover assumes an irregular trapezoidal shape, not that of a more regular rectangle.
Other factors simultaneously make sense of the discrepancies by incorporating them into new internally consistent patterns that recoup purity. The top edge of the headlight cover parallels a segment of the hood’s broken rear edge; both are perpendicular to the hood crease. The inboard edge of the headlight cover is parallel to the crease on the other side of the hood. It also intersects the bumper seam at a point aligned with the hood crease. The hood crease is perpendicular to the errant top of the grille (C)
Note that I refer to virtual relationships, not necessarily actual relationships. Working from photographs and the confusions of perspective, I cannot be certain how close to parallel, symmetrical, or perpendicular they actually are. But reality isn’t the issue anyway. As long as they are so plausible that my mind’s eye—and yours—jump to the conclusion that they might be parallel, symmetrical, or perpendicular they inevitably will have the desired aesthetic effects.
Diabolic factors at the rear include deck vents framed by tapered trapezoids. The vent slats ahead of the taillights are not parallel, but fanned slightly. Maintaining purity, the slats of the deck vents are equally spaced and their tapered sides intersect at the midpoint of the hatch’s rear edge, establishing a new symmetry. The taillights and vents associated with them are aligned and unified within the same visual units; these units are, in turn, aligned with similar units surrounding vents below the bumper. Most of these elements also are aligned with parallel, horizontal lines.
The Gallardo’s wheel design constitutes a microcosm of well-balanced purity and diabolic character. Circles are the purist of all closed figures, of course, because they are the simplest and most symmetrical. The multiplicity of elements encircled by the rim seems almost chaotic in comparison. Yet, it is highly ordered. Echoing the five bolts, five identical spokes and circular holes maintain a high level of purity. Five partial circles of the same size join the spokes to the rim.
The wheel has five mirror planes of symmetry. Placing a mirror perpendicular to its rim, aligned with a spoke and the wheel’s center, results in an image exactly like that of the complete wheel. There are five such equally-space positions for the mirror.
Positioning the mirror any other way produces an asymmetrical image that looks out of whack.
With only four bolts, the wheel could have at most only one mirror plane of symmetry. A four-spoke design could have four-plane symmetry. Even so, we probably wouldn’t like it as much as the five-spoke design. With a higher degree of alignment among the spokes, a four-spoke design would seem too pure—and too static. As a general rule, an odd number of spokes (especially five or seven) seem more suitably diabolic and dynamic than an even number. The purest possible wheel, with infinite-plane symmetry, would be a solid disk with a flush, circular hubcap hiding the bolts. But it would seem far too plain for a Lamborghini.