Sometimes design themes migrate across products types. I wonder if anyone has noticed the Chris Bangle/vanHooydonk (sp?) designed BMWs of the last few years. Could the aesthetics of this look be drawn into architecture, interior design and product design in any useful way? Or has it already been? I'm not asking for a critique of BMW's styling for cars, but if it has any merit for generalizing to other things? The styling was wildly resisted at the beginning, but now most every car stylist is having a go at what BMW has wrought. I've always been curious about what designers thought about adapting looks from one medium to another.
I don't see
"almost every" carmaker following that unfortunate "lead" -- though Cadillac has followed their own more disciplined version of it through several years of one-offs and production vehicles. I saw an STS (?) sedan today that I've thought puled it off fairly well.'
Would you say Constantin Grcic's chair and stool are examples? (I'm reminded of those third-decade Czeck "cubist" vessels that re-emerged a few years back. . .)
But the worst BMW's -- the big sedans and the nasty little roadster -- are. . .pathetic. (The chief "designer" rattled on in a recent interview about "making use of the new design and manufacturing technologies," as if those dictated a certain look.) Sorry -- just my view.
Any other interior/furniture manifestations to note ?
BMWs just want to be Pontiacs
BMW setting the design trend for cars- I assume you specifically mean sedans? I don't see it. Unless you mean that most sedans for the past several years look pretty lame, and BMW is no exception to the rule... but I don't see that as an influence, but a trend. If it is any consolation, I would not shame BMW into blaming them for being the trend setter on that front.
You also present this opinion as if it is some forgone conclusion, taken for granted as fact:
dcwilson wrote:
> The styling was wildly resisted at the beginning,
> but now most every car stylist is having a go at
> what BMW has wrought.
I don't see it at all. If you're going to offer up such a position, back it up with something (post some links here- Showing cars that you think were influenced by BMW and the BMWs that came *first* that you feel influenced them... then, if you're going to assert that this is the accepted point of view, some links to authorities other than yourself that think so.) Personally, whether intentional or accidental, I think the basterdization of the classic BMW grillfront is making them look more and more like Pontiacs. SEE 1995 PONTIAC BELOW.
The 7 series BMWs use to have very nice lines. It's only in the past five or six years or so that they've starting looking like crap.
http://www.cartalk.com/content/testdrives/Reviews/Images/pontiac-grandpr...
American cars
American cars are continuing to look to their own past for future inspiration... except of course with sedans, where they all look like boring generic "european styling"... except the premier american luxury sedan, Cadillac, which, although I'm not crazy about their design, can at least be credited with finding it own way, design-wise.
some thoughts Part 1
Here's a small list. My definitive case is the new Lexus LS460, but most of these examples below make my point in greater or lesser ways (at least in my amateur's eyes). I would go to any of the major car mag websites and look for recent car show pics if you needs visual aids.
2006 Acura RDX near production concept (BMW X3/5 side and rear treatments unmistakeable; haven't seen front)
2006 Lexus IS 250/350 (BMW facial influence unmistakeable)
2007 Lexus LS460 (BMW 7 series clone all over it, as noted above)
2007 Lexus ES350 and GS450 (BMW bustle butt trunk, minimal flame siding effect, 3 series roofline)
2007 Toyota Camry (BMW bustle butt trunk)
2006 Lincoln MKS concept (most of it)
2006 Subaru B9 Tribeca (overall proportions, side sculpturing from B pillar back, rear end, everything frankly but a ripped of Alfa face).
I have left out a lot of concepts (Audi's Shooting Brake concept and 2007 TT) and 2006 production cars (latest VW Passat and Jetta) that I think have mildly aped the BMW side sculpting, because there are a number of car makers that have jumped on this recently and you might be tempted to call this part of a "trend."
Regarding your touting of current American car styling, I wish I could agree but I can't. IMHO, its reached something of an all time nadir. American stylists seem incapable of coming up with anything new and beautiful. They are rather pathetically obsessed with imitating the homeliest of old American car design (e.g., the Plymouth PT cruiser and the Chevy clone of it), or taking a wonderfully crisp, lean 60s Mustang and making it look heavy and slow (which it certainly isn't), or completely goofing up a classic like the T-Bird by emulating only its weak performance, cramped interior and instead turning out a tube of toothpaste body shape far closer to an Alfa Graduate Spyder with a glandular problem than the only T-Bird worth emulating--the original. Mercifully, the neoBird has been taken out and shot. I don't hate the styling of the NeoBird so much as I find it an uninspiring answer to a design question no one asked: how do I swell up an Alfa Spyder to obese proportions and then disfigure it with disconnected illusions to 60s Thunderbirds.
some thoughts Part 2
Daimler Chrysler's 300C has proven a hit, likely because it is about the only truly new and different sedan the American car companies have attempted. It tries to be a graphic novel version of a gangsta car and succeeds quite nicely at that. Why 30-50 year old adults with families want that look must have to do with some psycho-perversity discovered by DaimlerChrysler's marketing geeks. But though its found a niche of happy buyers, the fact remains it proportions make it look like it ran into a cement wall and then backed up into another one. It has to have some of the homeliest proportions of all time and feels like a tomb inside because of the nurdishly high belt line and bomb shelter thick A,B and C pillars. This is the ideal car for people who commit crimes and don't want to be seen getting away, better than any Caddy limo ever. But that's damning with faint praise, don't you think?
American SUVs are ALL bland except for the Caddy take off from its handsome CTS, which merely looks incongrous. How many stealth fighters, which the nimble CTS keenly refers to with its baloney sliced styling, have the dimensions of an SUV. I mean it just looks ridiculous and anyone who gets in and out of it looks equally so. This is a classic case of mindlessly trying to carry a design theme slavisly and inappropriately to different scales.
American minivans are hopelessly ugly or indifferently bland and require no citations. They all suck.
American pickups are not repulsive, which is enough to be successful in competition with Japanese large pickup trucks that seem as if they were designed by persons who had never seen a pick up truck and had never taken a drawing class either. But especially those American pickup trucks aping tractor trailor rigs (Ford F250s and Dodges) are growing ever more inauthentic. And this is a crime. What drew people to pick-ups beyond their utility, was that they were authentic, no BS vehicles. Their designs were unique to their genre and they didn't try to ape cars or Kenworths. They were once upon a time just right for a lonely teenage bronkin' buck with a pink carnation (apologies to Don McClean) on his way to do some western dancing or a little makin' out on the levee, before it got blown by FEMA. But somewhere along the time that Vinnie Barbarino slapped on some carhartts and a foppish cowboy hat and took Debra Winger for a ride on the mechanical bull, well, the pick up was doomed, because the marketers started in on it.
some thoughts Part 3
Now what else is there? Ah, two seat American sports cars. The Corvette has had all of its 50s-60s stylistic huevos castrated; that's bad. Its also had all its hideous late 70s and early 80s excess for the sake of burned off and cauterized; that's good. Now the American icon is one of the great performance cars in the world dressed up in one of the great nothing looks of all time. The current look is something Bill Mitchell at GM might have come up with if he had been lobotomized and watched Oprah for a year. Totally nice. I hate nice in a Corvette. (Side note: Corvette fans should not feel alone. Ferraris have been turned into marketing buggies over the same period and are today utterly lacking in the discriminating taste and stylistic gism Enzo Ferrrari once insisted on from otherwise too often effete Italian styling houses. Now, the only truly magnificient looking exotic 2-seater comes from that former house of the ghastly, Lamborghini, go figure. What else is there? Oh, the rebadged and baloney sliced Caddy body on the Corvette. At least the proportions of the Vette are right. The Caddy's lines and proportions just look wrong to me...almost like the baloney sliced styling had to be fitted awkwardly onto...a Corvette or something. The Pontiac Solstice has a nice front and a nice butt that don't remotely go together. The Saturn version is more successful. But neither are going to inspire any rock and roll songs, or machine music riffs, and what fat greying rapper who hasn't already been killed is going to be caught dead in one of these Yankee Miatas? Oh, and the tops are absolutely imbecilic in functional terms.
How about midsized American sedans. The Ford 500 and its Mercury clone are nice rip offs of the previous generation Passats, but somehow more bland. Both have the Mays Curve side window silhouette found on the Passat, because J Mays did both the Fomoco products and the Passats. J Mays is also responsible for the NeoBird and the Ford Cobra concept. The latter was so bad that some people actually booed it at auto shows I have been told. IMHO, it wasn't so bad. It just lacked all of the stylistic virtues of the car it was supposed to recall and none of the positives. The new Cobra looked heavy where the old won looked lean. The belt line was high where the old one was low. The new grill looked like Carp sucker. The old one looked like something snarling out of a sex maniac's id. Frankly, that Cobra concept bore much the same relation to the original Cobra (an AC ripp off itself) that the new Mustang did to the old Mustang. Hey, J Mays did both. No wonder!
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