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.