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Gagosian Quarterly

Spring 2023 Issue

Conceptsin motion

Alison Castle reports on concept cars created by visionaries—architects, artists, amateurs—from outside the field on automotive design.

Bisiluro Damolnar, 1955, designed by Carlo Mollino in collaboration with Mario Damonte and Enrico Nardi. Photo: De Agostini/DEA/MUST/Getty Images

Bisiluro Damolnar, 1955, designed by Carlo Mollino in collaboration with Mario Damonte and Enrico Nardi. Photo: De Agostini/DEA/MUST/Getty Images

Alison Castle

Alison Castle (seen here with Marc Newson in a Ferrari 857 S at the 2022 1000 Miglia) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker. She holds a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and an MA in photography and film from New York University. She has edited and written many books on photography, film, and design for Taschen.

A layperson developing an interest in classic cars quickly discovers that the more one learns, the less one knows. Car culture is an insular world that, while by no means closed to outsiders, can seem impenetrable to anyone who might wonder, say, how it is that a four-cylinder can be more powerful than a V8. If that poor soul doesn’t already understand how combustion engines work and what turbocharging means, the answer will quickly devolve into nonsense. By and large, car people have spent their lives absorbing everything there is to know about cars, and in an advanced connoisseur this knowledge spans history, science, engineering, restoration, design, and aesthetics and includes an encyclopedic knowledge of car models, brands, coach builders, and designers. It seems like a lot because it is. You just have to dive in.

The point of entry can be anything as long as it draws you in. For art lovers, I suggest an exploration of some of the exceptional cars that were designed by people not working in the automotive industry: artists, industrial designers, architects—people known in other fields, or even self-taught. This is a very small niche in the car world but a fascinating one, and a perfect area of study for amateurs in the creative sphere. Indeed, the crossover between cars and art has more famously been the other way around: artists making art from actual cars. Two of the most famous examples are César Baldaccini and John Chamberlain, who worked extensively with car bodies. Gabriel Orozco, Erwin Wurm, and Maurizio Cattelan have made notable use of cars. (In 2000, Cattelan, who has said he “always wanted to create a rhetorical car,” wrapped the body of an Audi sedan around a tree trunk as if the tree had sprouted right up through it.) Less known but no less impressive examples include Ichwan Noor’s VW Beetles compressed into perfect spheres and cubes, a series begun in 2011, and Marcus Bowcott’s Trans Am Totem, a public installation in Vancouver (2015). The artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney has featured classic cars, and sculptures made from them, in many of his films. Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas (1974), features ten graffiti-tagged Cadillacs half buried in the ground, lined up like headstones or monoliths. And the list goes on.

Concepts in Motion

Voiture Minimum, 1936, rendering based on design by Le Corbusier. Photo: Antonio Amado

In a more liminal space hovering between the art and the car worlds are numerous examples of commercial cars painted by artists. Over the span of her career, the French artist and textile designer Sonia Delaunay painted several cars, including a 1924 Bugatti Type 35 and a 1925 Citroën, with adaptations of her textile designs. In the mid-1960s, Judy Chicago, in the wake of her husband’s death in a car crash, enrolled in auto-body school and created a remarkable series of painted car hoods. Since 1975, BMW has commissioned one-of-a-kind cars by artists including Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, but aside from the ice cocoon that Olafur Eliasson created for the BMW H2R in 2007, the artists’ interventions were limited to painting the bodies. Ironically, some of these unique works of auto art are valued at a fraction of what the artists’ work draws at auction. Car collectors tend to be interested in a car’s provenance, restoration quality, and racing history, while many art collectors habitually invest in pieces that can be displayed on a wall or a pedestal; artist-painted production cars exist in a kind of no-man’s-land.

Perhaps most fascinating, though, is a third category, where automobiles collide with art and design right on the drawing board—in the hands of industry outsiders. Take, for example, the Phantom Corsair and the Norman Timbs Special, both superb examples of what self-taught amateurs can achieve. The former, created in 1938 by Rust Heinz (grandson of ketchup magnate H. J. Heinz), is a lavish riot of Art Deco drama that really cannot be described in words. I’m tempted to say it looks like a cartoon robot shark on wheels with a hippopotamus’s snout, but that doesn’t begin to do the job. The car’s swooping lines and fanciful detailing are really quite stunning. Devoid of running boards, with flush fenders, fully skirted wheels, a split front windscreen, and hidden buttons rather than door handles, the Phantom Corsair was not just ahead of its time but outside of time altogether. It also had a 190-horsepower V8 engine, automatic transmission, and advanced suspension, and despite weighing 4,600 pounds, it could reach speeds of well over 100 miles per hour. Considering that Heinz had no experience in design or business, his achievement is quite incomparable—though it likely wouldn’t have been possible without Heinz money. His plans to put the car into production, and the promise of a bright future in automotive design, ended with his death in a car crash in 1939.

Concepts in Motion

Z-102 Cúpula, 1952, designed by Pegaso and committee of students from Spain. Photo: courtesy Louwman Museum, the Hague, Netherlands

The legendary French-American designer Raymond Loewy was a quintessential polymath, designing buildings, logos, Coca-Cola bottles and vending machines, locomotives, refrigerators, nasa spacecraft interiors, aircraft livery, furniture, textiles, wallpaper, watches . . . the list is ridiculous. Loewy called his design philosophy “maya”: “most advanced yet acceptable.” He had a keen instinct for the ideal balance of the familiar and the innovative, introducing accessible and realistic yet future-forward designs. During his career, he designed several cars, the most interesting of them surely the BMW 507 Custom Build of 1957. Described as “a competition sports car with Gran Turismo characteristics,” his prototype was built on the chassis of the 507 but otherwise bore no resemblance to the original, designed by Count Albrecht von Goertz. Here Loewy achieved a rare synthesis of futurism and familiarity, with novel features such as rectangular headlights, a honeycomb grille, and a swooping oval rear window. From behind, the car looks rather like a personal spaceship, but viewed from the side it looks reassuringly like a sports coupe. Loewy’s 507 wasn’t intended for production and remained a unique piece, but its influence can be seen on the Avanti that he designed for Studebaker in the early 1960s.

The Bisiluro Damolnar was a race car designed in 1955 by Carlo Mollino in collaboration with Mario Damonte and Enrico Nardi. Though best known as an architect and to a lesser extent as a furniture designer and photographer, Mollino was a true Renaissance man whose interests were remarkably catholic. His Bisiluro (Italian for “twin torpedoes”) sports a single seat, an asymmetrical form, a left-mounted engine, and an exposed frontal radiator. Some deem it a masterpiece, others the weirdest car to have raced Le Mans. It was aerodynamic, fast, and exceptionally lightweight—so much so that when it raced in the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans, it was literally blown off the track and severely damaged as a result. It has since been restored to its original resplendent glory and now, fittingly, resides in a Milan science museum named after Leonardo da Vinci.

In fact, a number of prominent architects have tried their hands at designing cars, although in many cases these projects began and ended at the drawing board. In 1920, Frank Lloyd Wright sketched out the Cantilever Car, which shared with many of his building designs a suspended roof projected from a central pillar, which allowed for the windows to wrap around the cabin uninterrupted by posts. Adolf Loos’s inspired but somewhat clunky contribution, which he modeled for Lancia in 1923, had a third row of seating elevated above the first two rows, with its own little windshield for unobstructed views. Walter Gropius’s attempts for Adler in 1929 gained more attention than those of Loos, but they were most notable for prioritizing elegance-enhancing superficial features over aerodynamics. Even Jean Prouvé threw his hat into the ring, but alas, little is known about his concept aside from rudimentary sketches.

Concepts in Motion

Linea Diamante © Archivio Domus – Editoriale Domus S.p.A. Photo: Daniele Russo

More interesting yet is Gio Ponti’s 1952 foray into automobile design. Intended for an Alfa Romeo 1900 chassis, his Linea Diamante bears absolutely no resemblance to an Alfa, or to any other mid-century car full stop. Ponti’s aim was to concoct an antidote to the swollen, curvaceous, small-windowed cars that were ubiquitous at the time. The Diamante is an unbearably endearing little fellow, and well ahead of its time, too. With its flat-paneled body, low hood, big square and triangular windows, and generous hatchback-style trunk, it foreshadowed the boxy compact cars that would come along in the 1970s and ’80s. The white line that encircles the car isn’t just for decoration: it’s a rubber bumper to help prevent dings from any angle. Ponti sought to have the car produced, but both Carrozzeria Touring and fiat turned him down, dashing his hopes to see the Diamante come to life. Sixty-five years later, fiat made a conciliatory gesture by collaborating on the creation of a 1:1 model with Domus, the architecture and design journal that Ponti founded, on the occasion of its ninetieth anniversary.

Of R. Buckminster Fuller’s many talents, architecture is probably the one for which he is most renowned, particularly thanks to his popularization of the geodesic dome. Fuller was also a great thinker, futurist, and inventor who developed a series of projects under the name “Dymaxion,” a portmanteau of the words “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension,” collectively referring to his goal of “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input.” First came a prefab house, then, in the early-to-mid-1930s, a car. Fuller’s Dymaxion work continued to evolve for decades, embracing the ambition to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” Irrespective of form or field, his projects always began with a question, and that question usually related to how humanity could best be served and advanced by an invention. True to this principle, the Dymaxion car was both democratic and progressive: it would carry eleven passengers and was intended to eventually be upgradable, thanks to its aerodynamic teardrop shape, into a flying machine by the addition of wings. With two wheels in the front and a third in the rear that steered the car, the Dymaxion could turn on a dime; Fuller imagined that once capable of flying, the car could easily extract itself from a traffic jam, take off like a bird, and sidle back onto the road at a more convenient location. Three prototypes were made, but physics and reality were the enemies of this ambitious project: the Dymaxion was dangerously unstable on its three wheels, and flying cars were, and remain, a strictly quixotic proposition.

Concepts in Motion

Quasar-Unipower, 1967, designed by Quasar Khanh. Photo: Reg Lancaster/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Renzo Piano’s VSS modular concept car, commissioned by fiat in 1978, reimagined automobile construction from the ground up, with the main part of the chassis consisting of a load-bearing internal frame and interchangeable front and rear elements. The exterior panels, made of plastic, were all hung from the central chassis, allowing the same base elements to be made into an exceptionally lightweight and compact sedan, hatchback, station wagon, etc. Piano’s project, made in collaboration with I.DE.A Institute, was innovative on an efficient, economic level; it was a “concept” car in the literal sense of the term, exploring how engineering could be optimized for a utilitarian car, but above all it was genuinely conceived to be producible. A working prototype was made and tested, but although fiat didn’t end up putting the VSS into production, the concept’s hatchback version came to life in the form of the Tipo, released in 1988.

Where Piano’s fiat envisioned itself as a way to revolutionize how cars are manufactured, Marc Newson’s Ford 021C, of 1999, was an exercise in imagining how a car could profoundly elevate the user experience. A polymath in the tradition of Loewy, Newson has designed everything from a fountain pen to an airplane, with an abundance of furniture and product designs in between. When he was hired by Ford design director J Mays to create a concept car, he mostly got free reign, thanks in part to the project being kept largely out of view from executives who might not have understood its value. Newson created a full-scale clay model from computer models based on drawings, and the final working prototype was built in the legendary Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin. The car’s minimal, symmetrical form belies its innovative features, such as swivel seats, rear-hinged doors that open to a surprisingly spacious, completely pillarless interior, optical-fiber ceiling lighting, a height-adjustable dashboard, simple aluminum touch buttons for door handles, and a trunk that opens like a drawer. The analog controls recall Newson’s Ikepod watches, and indeed every detail of the car has a signature Newson touch (he even designed the custom gunmetal-colored Pirelli tires, whose treads match the pattern of the ceiling and carpet). By starting with an empty cabin and inserting only necessary elements reduced to their simplest forms, Newson created a car designed to give its passengers comfort, ease, space, and nothing superfluous. It’s a great shame that the 021C was never put into production, but such is the fate of car concepts that dare to truly rethink how a car should be.

Concepts in Motion

Ford 021C Concept Car, 1999, designed by Marc Newson for Ford Motor Co. Photo: courtesy Ford Motor Company

Speaking of rethinking, the Spanish automaker Pegaso reasoned well outside the box with its Z-102 Cúpola of 1952. Though primarily a manufacturer of trucks and buses, Pegaso made some limited-production sports cars in the 1950s, and for the Cúpola it tried something truly inspired: the company asked Spanish students to submit their ideas for what the sports car of the future might look like and then brought to life what was essentially a crowdsourced car. The students clearly had rockets and flying saucers on their minds, but rather than a mash-up or a pastiche, the Cupola is an absolute breathtaker. Against all odds, the curvaceous yellow body, red-walled tires, shiny, perforated side exhausts, straight-skirted fenders, top-hinged windows, and boxy, bulbous rear windscreen come together in a kind of beautifully coherent alchemy.

Examples of imaginative cars such as these, designed by automotive outsiders, are far fewer than one would think or hope. It makes perfect sense to cast a wide net to find new ideas, but the car industry is not daring. In the project description for the VSS, Piano writes, “Why entrust this task to an architect . . . rather than one of the many successful automotive engineers fiat could count on? Probably the choice was motivated by the belief that to get real innovation you had to draw on external resources, free from the technical constraints and production limitations affecting every car.” Indeed, outsiders have created some of the most interesting car concepts in automobile history, ranging from the feasible (like many of the above), to the handmade work of art (see Serge Mouille’s retro-futuristic Panhard Le Zebre of 1953), to the outlandish (the 1967 Quasar-Unipower, by designer and engineer Quasar Khanh, is a fantastic example of an uncarlike vehicle that is still, somehow, a car). But pushing them through to production is another matter entirely. Car companies are profit driven and risk averse, which makes them poor purveyors of anything but incremental, market-tested innovation. Features cherry-picked from concept cars do get introduced, of course, and the public’s fascination with concept cars isn’t lost on automakers. But it takes a different kind of thinking entirely to imagine that a car could have its very own identity, envisioned by its creator just like a work of art.

Marc Newson’s supplement also includes: “In Conversation: Ruth Rogers and Marc Newson”, “Iwa Sake and Kura”, “Sketch Book” by Marc Newson, and “Il Sorpasso” by Carlos Valladares.

Still from Il Sorpasso (1962), directed by Dino Risi. Photo: Fair Film/Album/Alamy Stock Photo

Il Sorpasso

Carlos Valladares writes on Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (1962), examining the narrative structure and underlying tensions that keep viewers returning to this classic film.

Marc Newson and Ruth Rogers

In Conversation
Ruth Rogers and Marc Newson

Marc Newson joins restaurateur Ruth Rogers to discuss the compendium of topics he selected for a special supplement he guest-edited for the Spring 2023 issue of the Quarterly.

The brewing process at IWA Sake, Shiraiwa kura, Japan, 2021. Photo: Nao Tsuda, courtesy IWA Sake

Iwa Sake and Kura

As part of the artist’s guest-edited special section for the Spring 2023 issue of the Quarterly, Marc Newson reflects with IWA Sake founder Richard Geoffroy and architect Kengo Kuma on their respective contributions to IWA Sake in Japan: bottle, brewing, and building. The sake brewery, or kura in Japanese, takes its name from its site of Shiraiwa, located in the town of Tateyama.

Toyo Ito, project for The Tokyo Toilet, Yoyogi-Hachiman, Tokyo, 2021

In Conversation
Toyo Ito, Marc Newson, and Koji Yanai

The Tokyo Toilet project has added twelve new public restrooms by renowned architects and designers to the city’s map since 2020, with five more scheduled to open in 2022. To learn more about the initiative, the Quarterly spoke with founder Koji Yanai and two of the participating designers, Toyo Ito and Marc Newson.

Marc Newson, London, 2018.

In Conversation
Marc Newson and Derek Blasberg

Marc Newson tells Derek Blasberg about his newest creations, explaining the backstory of these ornate works.

Marc Newson

Behind the Art
Marc Newson

In this video, Marc Newson provides an overview of his latest exhibition. He details the various technical processes behind his new designs, including works in cloisonné, surfboards, swords, and large-scale glass chairs.

Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.

Black and white portrait of Lisa Lyon

Lisa Lyon

Fiona Duncan pays homage to the unprecedented, and underappreciated, life and work of Lisa Lyon.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland

Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art

Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.

Black and white portrait of Alexey Brodovitch

Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch

Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Installation view with Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–)

Douglas Gordon: To Sing

On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.

Detail of Lauren Halsey sculpture depicting praying hands, planets, and other symbol against red and green background

Black Futurity: Lessons in (Art) History to Forge a Path Forward

Jon Copes asks, What can Black History Month mean in the year 2024? He looks to a selection of scholars and artists for the answer.