Car Design

This book reflects this variety not meaning to delight car fans only. Therefore, the focus is not so much on technology as on relations between people and cars, fashion and trends, cultures and design languages. For this reason, visual imagery plays an important role. While all images have been carefully selected from original archives, some of them have never been released before. The reason is often banal: frequently, a beautiful scenery or a piece of architecture steal the show from the car—the point lies elsewhere, as Roland Barthes would say. That is precisely the subject of this book: it is not about a portrait of the car as an industrial product, but as a member of our society, with all its colors and nuances. Design critique can take a scientific form.

Car Design

Tumminelli, Paolo

teNeues

2006

Abstract

However, more often than not it is our feelings, or the preference for a specific brand, that either enable or prevent us from giving an objective opinion about a product's design quality. This book is scientifically researched, to the extent that it explains the development of modern car design starting by ordering 1222 models dating between 1947 and 2004 into 20 newly defined groups. The cars portrayed here are by no means all, nor the most attractive or best models to have been created in the post-war era. Still, they either represent a particular style, pioneered a design innovation or show unique features. All of them are interesting, many are worth rediscovering. Ultimately, deciding which cars are attractive or ugly—basically, no one is—is all about that special feeling.