Michelotti's Grossly Exaggerated Presentation Drawings

Giovanni Michelotti (1921-1980) was one of the leading Italian automobile stylists of his day. But he is perhaps less well-known than others because his career was largely that of a free-lancer -- designing bodies that were built by established carrozzeria, both famous and less-so. The name of the coach building firm would be associated with the design, not Michelotti. His production car designs for Standard-Triumph also did not have his name or a carrozzeria crest attached to them.

His Wikipedia entry lists many of his designs.

This post deals with his presentation drawings, an important part of the marketing effort by a freelancer and even a carrozzeria. The idea was to show clients what a proposed design might look like. Other such tools might have included detailed side/front/rear drawings or even small scale models. But a comparatively quickly-done drawing or two might be good enough for the potential client to ask for more work on the design theme presented.

What I find interesting is that many of Michelotti's drawings, especially those form the early 1950s, were so highly distorted/exaggerated that they did a poor job of showing what a completed car would actually look like.

Gallery

Bill Mitchell sketch of a possible 1938 Buick - c. 1936
Exaggerated concept drawings were common practice before Michelotti began his career. Bill Mitchell soon became head of Cadillac styling and eventually was General Motors' Design Vice-President.

Michelotti drawing of the Cunningham C3 - 1952-53
Michelotti was providing the Vignale firm many designs such as this one at that time. The actual car's shape was much shorter and taller, but the general layout and details such as the grille are indicated here.

Fiat 1400 proposals for Balbo Carrozzeria - 1950
More examples of exaggerated perspective.

Fiat 1400 proposals for Viotti Carrozzeria - 1952
And another with the same distortion scheme as for the Cunningham shown above.  The front wheel is much too large.

Maserati proposal for Ghia-Aigle carrozzeria - 1956
A distorted-perspective rendering from five years later.

Daimler proposal for Ghia-Aigle - 1955
Another distorted view of a proposed design.

Another Daimler proposal for Ghia-Aigle - 1955
Made about the same time for the same brand and coachbuilder, this side view of a four-door sedan shows that Michelotti did work out buildable designs. But which came first? -- the perspective sketch or the measured drawing?

Triumph proposals - c. 1962
Side views of proposed designs indicating practical considerations such as the seating layout.

Triumph perspective sketch - c. 1962
Another stretched-perspective drawing. This is of essentially the lower design seen in the previous image. Note the Citroën DS-19 type light mounted on the C-pillar. It is shown clearly in the side view and some sort of light is crudely indicated in the perspective. The matter is debatable, but I wonder if in this case a side-view with a pillar-mounted light was done before the perspective drawing. Otherwise, it's a detail that could safely be omitted from a preliminary sketch from this low viewpoint.

Rendering of Triumph GT6 - mid-1960s
By the mid-60s Michelotti was making more accurate perspective drawing of his design proposals.

Cross-posted at Car Style Critic

Ocean Liners: Speed and Style at the V&A

London's Victoria & Albert Museum has an exhibit titled "Ocean Liners: Speed and Style" that will be going on into June. Here is the V&S's web page for it, though it might disappear once the exhibit closes.

It's not a large exhibit, perhaps limited by the space available for such things, so I found it a bit over-priced at 18 pounds. But I found it enjoyable because the 1920s and 1930s have always fascinated me, and most of the items on display are from those times -- especially the 1930s.

Below are some photos I took when I was there in April.

Gallery

Collection of 1930s ocean liner furniture and décor.
Sadly, I neglected to take a documentation photo, so cannot tell you where the items originated.

Decorative relief, perhaps from the Queen Mary
Very Art Deco, and might have been from almost any new French, Italian or British liner, though the airplane looks like a British de Havilland Rapide (again, I failed to document the source).

Study for Normandie interior

Decorations from the Normandie

Display evocative of mid-1930s fashions for passengers in First Class ship sections. In the background is a repeating sequence from a contemporary movie. I must confess this gives me a strong sense of false-nostalgia.

Deck chair from unidentified (by me) ship

Now comes the Big Surprise -- for me, anyway. It's the model of the 1932 streamlined ocean liner designed by Norman Bel Geddes.

Establishment shot to provide sense of scale

Front quarter view

Rear quarter view

Binary Stoplights

The typical stoplight or traffic light or traffic signal (these are alternative names for the same thing) has three lenses of different color. The one at the top in a vertically-oriented unit shines red when lighted. Below that is an orange light, and the one at the bottom signals in green. For more information that you will likely want or need, link to this Wikipedia entry.

But there was a time when stoplights were binary -- only red and green lenses were mounted. I remember seeing them here in Seattle when I was very young. Don't believe me? Then take a look at this:

This fuzzy color photo taken in the summer of 1941 is of an intersection in downtown Seattle. Note the stoplight at the upper-left corner.

It can be pretty hairy driving along when all of a sudden that green light switches to red when you're driving 25 miles per hour and are less than 100 feet from the intersection. You have no choice but to continue on through, hoping that cars getting the green light don't immediately enter the intersection. How it probably worked was that when the signal changed from red to green, drivers would hesitate stepping on the accelerator, realizing that cars could still be approaching on the cross-street.

At the time I first became aware of stoplights, Seattle was transitioning from binary to the triple-lens variety, and binary lights were long gone by the time I learned to drive.

All-in-all, this is an instance of human factors being neglected in design work: The problem should have been recognized much earlier.

1930s Speed Lines

As the fields of industrial design and automobile styling were ramping up in the 1930s, streamlining became something of a fad. Later observers giggled at streamlining of non-mobile objects such as pencil sharpeners that never required aerodynamic efficiency for basic operation. Perhaps this was in reaction to some proselytizing by new industrial designers who claimed in effect that form that followed function would be beautiful and, by the way, sell well.

A more modest concurrent public relations and client sales approach was to "clean up" fussy, engineering-inspired design of the past. Here again, the results would be stronger sales in an era of depressed economy.

Theory and ideology aside, most designers recognized by mid-decade that to some extent they were in the fashion business because clients were soon asking them to "freshen" or even redesign products that had been touted as being purely function-driven.

As for streamlining, aircraft increasingly were becoming strongly streamlined, especially those made of metal. By around the 1934 model year, automobiles began to be designed with reference to serious concerns for aerodynamic efficiency (as they are to a far greater degree now). A famous case in point was the 1934 Chrysler Airflow.

But for various reasons, not all cars were given more than superficial streamlining in those days. Often streamline-like decor was added to provide a sense of streamlining. Furthermore, industrial designers and architects also included hints of streamlining in buildings and products.

In this post, I present examples of "speed lines" -- parallel ornamentation shapes suggesting airflow passing along or over the basic shape of the object. A fad, but in retrospect, a fun and basically harmless one.

Gallery

1934 Chevrolet - Barrett-Jackson auction photo
Modest speed lines can be seen along the side of the hood and rear wheel skirt.

1934 Nash
Speed lines here are more elaborate, being found on front and rear fender valances and atop the hood.

Chrysler Airflow facelift proposal - ca. 1934-35
By Norman Bel Geddes. This unused proposal featured grooves along most of the car.

Taxi design - 1938
By Raymond Loewy. Multiple, stacked bumpers also serve as speed lines.

Pennsylvania Railroad S-1 locomotive by Loewy - 1939
An addition to some actual streamlining at the front of the boiler section, Loewy added speed lines wrapping around the front and sides. That's Loewy in the photo.

Sears Coldspot refrigerator by Loewy - 1935
An early Loewy design with vertical speed lines.

Air-King Products radio - 1930-33
Designed by John Gordon Rideout and Harold van Doren. Plenty of parallel lines along with some skyscraper-inspired massing of the body. Photo from Brooklyn Museum.

Kodak Baby Brownie camera - 1935
By Walter Dorwin Teague. More than most early industrial designers, Teague liked parallel speed line décor.

Sparton 517-B radio by Teague - 1936

Texaco Type C filling station by Teague - ca. 1936
Streamlining is evoked here in the curved shapes associated with the overhang. Speed lines wrap around the building.

1942 Chrysler
Now it's the early 1940s, but Chrysler stylists gave their 1942 model one final, heavy, pre-war dose of speed lines.

Alexander Leydenfrost: Illustrating Technical Stuff

American readers born before, say, 1950 might recall leafing through copies of Life Magazine or other publications and coming across illustrations by Alexander Leydenfrost (1888-1961). What most viewers didn't realize was that Leydenfrost was an Hungarian Baron who moved to the United States in 1923 to escape the aftermath of the Great War. By 1930 he was working as an industrial designer for Norman Bel Geddes, and at the end of the decade moved into illustration full-time. Those and other details can be found in this short Wikipedia entry.

After a fling in Planet Stories, a science-fiction magazine, Leydenfrost built his illustration career depicting current and futuristic machines and settings. This was not a large step away from making certain kinds of industrial design presentations. However, he had an artistic sense that set him apart from those simply skilled in product rendering, which is why his scenes were usually dramatic and halfway believable even if they dealt with future possibilities.

Gallery

Brooklyn Battery Tunnel - 1950

Fleeing after atomic attack - Pageant Magazine - February 1951

Science on the March - Popular Mechanics Magazine - January 1952
This was a spread in the magazine's 50th anniversary issue.  Click on the illustration to enlarge.

Future Dirigible - ca. 1944

B-26 Bomber - 1942 or 1943

Pennsylvania Railroad calendar illustration - 1945

Dale Chihuly's Portable Radios With Plastic Cases, and More

This is actually one of my occasional industrial design posts, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to begin using a link to an artist.

That artist is Dale Chihuly (1941 - ), master of glass installations (Wikipedia entry here). A couple of years ago, a museum devoted to Chihuly was opened in Seattle right next to the well-known Space Needle. Attached to the museum is a restaurant called Collections Café. Its Web site is here, and a Seattle Magazine article about it is here.

That article notes that the name "Collections" refers to the cafe's decor, which is dominated by objects Chihuly collected over the years. The link includes some photos that help give you the flavor of the place.

The photo at the top of this post is from Seattle Met magazine and shows a wall display in the cafe consisting of dozens of pre-transistor portable radios from the 1940s and 50s for the most part. The variety of styles grafted onto fairly similar electronic boards is astonishing.

A little context for that era of small (for the time) plastic-cased radios is offered below.

Gallery

Philco 40-180 - 1940
Many households of the 1930s had a large radio such as the one shown here.  Such a device was normally located in the living room and served as the focus for evening entertainment for a family.

Philco 84B - 1935
Not all radios were large back then.  That's because the chassis with its vacuum tubes (valves, in Britain) could be pretty much the same size for all AM radios since the electronic functionality was the same.  What usually varied was the size of the cabinet and perhaps the size of the speakers.  The radio shown here is a table-top type that could be placed in a living room, bedroom, home office or somesuch place.
The Philco model illustrated here is the same type as our family radio when I was a wee tyke; it was used until television came along.  I still have that radio.  It looks almost the same as the one above except that the dial has sort of an orange hue.

Philco 38-15T - 1938
By the late 1930s engineers were able to create more compact layouts allowing for even smaller sets.

Philco PT-25 - 1940
Philco cased its radios using wood through most of the 1930s, but added plastic by 1940.

Westinghouse H-127 Little Jewell - 1945-47
An early post- World War 2 portable radio, this from Westinghouse.  I include it because I had such a radio in my bedroom when I was young.  Unlike the old Philco, I no longer have it.

Over-Designed Flatware

Flatware (or silverware, as perhaps most people call it) presents an interesting challenge for designers. The basic pieces -- knife, fork and spoon -- have specific tasks in the eating process. Moreover, they must be held by human hands of various sizes (though the range for adults is fairly limited), and therefore cannot be too large or too small. In fact, flatware items of a given type (table knife, butter knife, soupspoon, teaspoon, etc.) are usually pretty much the same size across sets.

The design challenge largely lies in creating a distinctive appearance for a flatware set when there are already many hundreds of patterns having appeared over the years. Usually the distinction-creation focus is on ornamentation and detailing, the general shapes being largely traditional.

But the ethos of Modernism in its classical form holds that ornamentation is to be shunned. Therefore, a modernist designer must concentrate on shape alone to create a distinctive flatware set for the marketplace. The task is difficult thanks to this additional design constraint, and it isn't surprising that some designers seem to try too hard. In this case, the result often is a visually interesting design that is marred by ergonomic (human factors) defects.

Let's look at some examples of flatware designs that suffer from that problem.

Gallery

Josef Hoffmann for Wiener Werkstätte - c. 1903-04
Hoffman (biographical links here and here) thought of himself primarily as an architect, but he also devoted considerable effort to domestic design, such as for the silver flatware set shown here.  The tips of the handles contain tiny bits of what can be called decoration,  The round opening between the tines of the center fork also is pure decoration.  Potential ergonomic problems include the arbitrary round spoon bowls and the broad, flat handles on most of the other pieces.

Josef Hoffman - Hugo Pott 86 - 1955
Half a century later, not long before his death, Hoffmann created this design.  The little round knobs at the ends of the handles serve to help balance while holding the piece, though they are basically decorative.  To me, the problem is that the handles seem too thin to grasp comfortably.

Arne Jacobsen - 1957
As Wikipedia indicates, Jacobsen also was basically an architect who practiced industrial design on the side.  The (partial) set shown here is interesting to look at, but probably not easy to use.  For example, the fork tines seem too few, too short and perhaps too sharp.  The flat handles might be a little uncomfortable to hold.  The knives and spoons could be better balanced.

Sasaki Aria Asani
This set is from a Japanese firm, but I don't have a date for it.  Again, wide, flat, poorly balanced handles.

Yamazaki Haiku
Another set from Japan, designer and date unknown (to me, anyway).  The design is interesting and creative: note the split handles (a decoration, not being functional) and uneven fork tine lengths.  But yet again, I doubt that the pieces would be comfortable to use.  And the split handles might be hard to clean.

Norman Bel Geddes' First City of the Future

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), shown above posing with a model city of the future, is perhaps most famous for his Futurama America in 1960 exhibit in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. But before that, he did a trial run for the Shell Oil Company in a 1937 series of advertisements.

Well, I think it was a trial run. But given the lead-time required to construct the GM exhibit, it's possible that the two somewhat similar projects might have been started at about the same time. Some Googling failed to turn up anything definite regarding this, but perhaps an existing or forthcoming Geddes biography will have the details.

The smaller-scale Shell project was nevertheless a typical bravura Geddes combination of showmanship, technology and imagination. Below are images of the model of the Shell City of Tomorrow along with a few advertisements featuring it. Click on them to enlarge.

Gallery