The Art of American Car Design: The Profession and Personalities—“Not Simple like Simon” by C. Edson Armi, and: Power behind the Wheel: Creativity and the Evolution of the Automobile by Walter J. Boyne

Abstract

314 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE publisher—doubly so because the subject of design so often attracts only shallow treatment. Jeffrey L. Meiklf Dr. Mkiki.k. who is associate professor of American studies and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, writes frequently on design history. The Art of American Car Design: The Profession and Personalities—“Not Simple like Simon.’’ By C. Edson Armi. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Pp. viii + 312; illustrations, notes, index. $34.50. Power behind the Wheel: Creativity and the Evolution of' the Automobile. By Walter J. Boyne. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1988. Pp. 240; illustrations, index. $35.00. Historians have produced a massive amount of published research on the history of the American automobile industry, but they have not thoroughly studied the way in which automobile designers function, in part because of the veil of secrecy that the automakers have drawn over the process. C. Edson Armi is an art historian who has produced a pioneer study that lifts that veil and throws much light on the design process. Armi’s work is competent, convincing, and full of insights into the people who have designed America’s cars and the environ­ ments in which they have worked. The Art of American Car Design consists of two distinct segments, an overall history of American car design and a collection of interviews with nine major designers. This is largely a history of styling at General Motors, with emphasis on the contributions of Harley Earl, who directed styling there from 1927 through 1958. Later GM vice-presidents for design, the flamboyant Bill Mitchell (1958—77) and the more cautious Irv Rybicki (1977 to the present), also get more ink than other designers, although Armi does not ignore important stylists like Bob Gregorie at Ford and Raymond Loewy at Studebaker. The emphasis on General Motors is not misplaced, because the firm was the industry’s styling leader from the mid-1920s until quite recently, and its design system is still used by all the American automakers. Harley Earl, whose father produced custom cars for Hollywood celebrities, came to Detroit in 1927 to head the new Art and Colour Section at General Motors, at the invitation of Alfred Sloan. By the mid-1930s, Earl had developed the largely anonymous, collective system for designing mass-produced automobiles still used today. The system included separate locked studios that served to ensure design secrecy, promote competition among the divisions and individual designers, and reduce the effect of any single designer on the final product. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 All of General Motors’ cars produced from the late 1920s through the late 1950s reflected Earl’s aesthetic sense. He was a superb critic of styling but was also a tyrant who tightly controlled the entire design process. Earl was a large man (6 feet, 4 inches) with an intimidating personality, whose close friendship with Sloan gave him enormous power within General Motors. Earl insisted on a rigid design sequence proceeding from two-dimensional sketches to “orthographic render­ ings” and only then to three-dimensional models. I looked in vain for a discussion of how orthographic renderings are created and what their value is, especially compared to line drawings and models. After laying out the Harley Earl/GM design system in some detail, Armi briefly examines the personalities and practices of Earl’s succes­ sors as well as other designers in the industry. He also presents a useful survey of major design trends from the 1920s through the mid-1980s. But descriptive terminology—for example, the “monocoque type” car of the 1940s—is often left unexplained. The rest of the volume is an extensive section of over 100 black-and-white photographs and Armi’s interviews with nine designers. The inter­ views offer valuable insights into the designers’ personalities as well as the settings in which they exercised their creative talents. WalterJ. Boyne’s Power behind the Wheel examines the evolution of auto­ mobile design worldwide, including mechanical features and styling. Fully half of the book consists of historical and contemporary photographs of automobiles; the striking color photos by Linda Lewis would alone warrant purchase ofthe volume. But this...