Car Design

Text in English & German. If laziness is the mother of all inventions, then the car is its masterpiece. The earliest means of locomotion was walking, followed by riding on horses or camels; finally, with the invention of the wheel, came the ability to use carriages, which not only made locomotion far more comfortable but also brought the transportation of goods to a whole new level. However, it then took millennia for carriages to go from being propelled by horses or oxen to engines, initially steam-driven, then propelled by internal combustion engines and early experiments with electric propulsion. Cars were initially the result of pure craftsmanship, and as passenger cars were based on the concept of the carriage. The assembly line had not entirely abandoned the carriage look, but already showed a typical automobile profile: equal-sized wheels, engine bonnet, passenger compartment. The predominant body colour of cars manufactured between 1910 and 1930 was black, while all makes of car had an almost uniform appearance. As manufacturers moved away from metal-panelled wooden frames to an all-steel design, they hesitantly ventured to adopt new forms. Improved undercarriages and higher engine performance were initially limited by air resistance, which above a speed of 60 kilometres per hour is the strongest of all driving resistances. This led to the development of new body shapes that offer less resistance to the airstream. Engineers still determined the form of the car, sometimes even achieving formal elegance. It was only rarely that members of other professions, such as the architects Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius, were commissioned to design a car. Between the two World Wars North America had the worlds largest fleet of cars; this also meant that their design became an increasingly important sales factor. Professsional automobile design was established. As they continued to develop technically, cars in the 1950s moved further and further away from the physically logical form of a moving body. One of the last and most outstanding examples of a form with optimum resistance to the airstream is the Citron ID/DS of 1955. Others, indeed almost all, opted for the pure symbolism of speed and power, whose most important ingredients were tail fins and chrome. Today, with a global annual production of close to 100 million passenger cars, automotive style has come to be represented by a wide range of almost every imaginable form. Architect Hans-Ulrich von Mende has worked with partners in an independent practice since 1990. For 50 years his writings and drawings on automotive design have appeared in books, trade journals (mot, autobild) and the daily press (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sddeutsche Zeitung).