JOHN ZEAMAN

Design

Cars of Tomorrow

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What will the car of the future look like? Given America’s love affair with dressed-up trucks, will the new cars be lightweight tractor-trailers or luxury bulldozers with overdrive?

Dream on America. The car of the future is not designed for you. The car of the future is for the rest of the world, people who are not consumed with fantasies of driving up stream beds, but simply want to get from point A to point B with a reasonable degree of efficiency, comfort, and style.

Nine of these cars are parked right now in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden for a show titled “Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century.” In fact, they are not really so futuristic. Most of them are being driven already or will be in a few months, either here, in Japan, or in Europe.

The cars in this show have electric engines, or combination electric and internal combustion. They are made of lighter materials such as aluminum or composites of plastic and metal. Some of them have a half or a quarter the number of parts of conventional cars, and several position the engine neither in front, nor in back, but underneath the passenger compartment.

Carmakers envision these autos making the commute into Peking or New Delhi – car ownership in China and India is expected to skyrocket in the next 10 years – or slipping into minuscule parking spaces in Caracas or Sao Paulo, cities where gridlock is so bad that people can only drive their cars on alternate days.

Most of the cars are small – some very small – and they range in appearance from the sleek and streamlined to utilitarian boxes.

The most outrageously scrunched of the bunch is the – “Smart Car,” which is 8 foot 2 inches long and was developed by the Swatch watch company and Mercedes Benz. To American eyes it doesn’t look quite serious – more like some kind of “autopod” that is used to shuttle across the mall parking lot. Like the Swatch watch, the car is meant to be affordable and easily customizable. It has proved popular in Europe, especially with young people who like its multicolored dashboard and controls and the removable body panels that allow for a quick and cheap color change.

Despite its diminutive size, it has several safety features – front and side air bags, and a reinforced metal frame around the passenger compartment.

Daimler Chrysler’s Composite Concept Vehicle was specially designed for developing nations. “Our initial direction was to develop a car that was as easy to assemble as a toy,” said Chrysler executive Francois Castaing. Hence, the car has only one quarter the number of parts of a typical car and the entire vehicle splits down the middle, front to back, and is assembled with four bolts and adhesive.

Because of its simplicity, factory assembly takes only 6 1/2 hours. Instead of having a painted finish, the car’s body is molded in color – just like a telephone, coffee maker, or other plastic object. It weighs a mere 1,200 pounds, hence requires only a two-cylinder engine, and, in anticipation of the bumps and gullies of roads in developing countries, it has a high wheel clearance of 8 inches.

Although some of the cars in the show are two-seaters, designed for young people or commuters, The Fiat Multipla Bipower – introduced in 1998 – is a family car, with a spacious interior despite a moderate length of only 13 feet. Its 6-foot width allows for three bucket seats both in the front and the back, and its unusual height gives it a spacious feel. The car is engineered in two parts: a lower section contains the engine and drivetrain, and the tall upper section is for passengers and cargo. In case of an accident, the lower section of the car is supposed to bear the brunt of the impact. To improve visibility, the car has headlights and taillights that are placed at three different heights on the body.

The “Bipower” aspect refers to an engine that can use regular gasoline or methane, which is less polluting. It has two tanks and can alternate between the two fuels.

Toyota and Honda have produced cars that are hybrid-powered – both electric and gasoline engines. The Honda VV, available in a few months here and in Japan, is a two-seat subcompact with a three-cylinder gasoline engine and an electric motor as its secondary power source. A computer decides which one should be used, depending on the driving situation. Its lightweight aluminum space frame and composite body panels give it an average fuel economy of 70 miles per gallon, giving it the ability to go 700 miles on a single tank – the distance from New York to Detroit.

Toyota’s Prius, which has been available in Japan since 1997, is the most conventional looking of the cars. Like the Honda, it has computer-controlled, alternating gasoline and electric engines. Because it relies more on the electric motor in stop-and-go traffic, it gets its best gas mileage under those conditions.

Fully electric cars produce no emissions, but have the disadvantage of a limited driving range between recharges. The General Motors EV1 has been around since 1995. It is the most aerodynamically sleek of the cars, with rear wheels that are 9 inches closer together than the front ones, giving it a teardrop shape. The EV1 can go approximately 50 to 70 miles before its batteries need recharging. This can be done in three hours at specially equipped stations, but takes 12 to 16 hours at home using a portable unit.

The prize for the most weirdly named car goes to the Ford Ka. That is what the ancient Egyptians called the soul, the entity that was preserved by mummification practices. The Ford Company uses the more upbeat, modern translation of “vitality.”

Introduced in Europe and South America in 1996, the bubble-shaped subcompact – smaller than the Fiesta or Escort – gets 48 miles per gallon.

The clunkiest looking of the cars is the boxy Audi Al2. It has a number of electronic gizmos, such as photo-sensors for parking and an automatic distance control that alerts drvers when they are getting too close to the car ahead.

The history of automobile design in America has been as much about status as practicality. Americans have never gotten over the love of big cars, whether it was the big boats of the Fifties that hogged the road or the up-on-stilts SUVs of the Nineties that allow their occupants to look down on all the little people. Barring another fuel crisis here, that’s not likely to change. But as carmakers set up factories specfically for these practical cars, the volume of sales worldwide could create “universal” cars that would be so cheap, they would make inroads even here.

The Museum of Modern Art

1999

A.G. Rizzoli

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In 1990, a Berkeley, Calif., gallery owner, Bonnie Grossman, made one of those discoveries that specialists in outsider art dream about. Intrigued by a visitor’s offer to sell several strange architectural drawings by an artist named A.G. Rizzoli, she followed a trail of clues that led her to the artist’s great-nephew and a garage packed to the rafters with the work of a lifetime.

There were minutely detailed architectural drawings of imaginary buildings, as well as countless sheets covered with dense webs of prose, poetry, diagrams, and drawings. Some bore Rizzoli’s signature, while others were signed with unusual names such as Grandiscosti, Copenhagen, Angelhart, and Metermaid. Still others carried self-referential titles such as Chronicler, Idolator, Magnifier, Wanderer, and Messenger.

“Mother Symbolically Represented”

Taken together, the work constituted an imaginary world carved out at nights and on weekends by a quiet, friendless bachelor who lived with his mother and worked by day as an architectural draftsman. Most of his work had been done in the 1930s and 1940s, and at the time of the 1990 discovery, the artist had been dead for nine years.

During his lifetime, he had mounted small exhibits in the front room of his tiny cottage in Oakland, but these Sunday afternoon events – advertised by fliers posted in his working-class neighborhood – attracted only a handful of people, most of them children.

Now in an exhibit organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, and currently at Manhattan’s Museum of American Folk Art, Rizzoli has been given the exposure that eluded him during his lifetime.

It was a life lived, as he described it “in an unbelievable hermetically sealed, spherical, inalienable maze of light and sound, seeing imagery expanding in every direction.”

Growing up in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Rizzoli was inspired by the utopian spirit of the architects who helped to rebuild the city. In fact, his first creative endeavors were a series of novellas and short stories about a group of heroic and idealistic architects. Frustrated in his efforts to publish these works, he turned to large pen-and-ink renderings – many as tall as 5 feet – of buildings. These were unusual, not just in appearance – they combined beaux-arts Roman, Renaissance, baroque, art deco, and art nouveau styles – but in being symbolic representations of people he knew.

He described these as “the conversion of the soul into objects of monumental character.” He devoted a number of these to his mother, who is always represented as a Gothic cathedral or “kathedral.” The inscriptions and explanatory notes on these works are done in the flashy type of commercial advertising or P.T. Barnum posters, adorned with images of various seals and blue ribbons. Some buildings appear to be dramatically illuminated or crisscrossed with spotlights.

It’s far from easy reading the characters of the people “symbolically sketched” as buildings. A man praised for his “intellectual brilliancy” has a pyramidal-shaped temple, or church, that seems hewn from solid rock and adorned with delicate spires and finials. His mother’s cathedral is always a balanced structure, anchored to the ground with a solid foundation. In his portrait of a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Healy, there is a sense of two buildings melded together in a skyscraper that is an odd mix of medieval Gothic and 1920s art deco.

The strangest building by far is that devoted not to a person, but to the artist’s own sexual awakening. Rizzoli was apparently ignorant of the facts of life and of female anatomy (though he shared a bedroom with his mother till she died) until age 40 when he saw the genitals of a young child. So great was his shock that it gave rise to a skyscraper titled, and misspelled, “The Primal Glimse at Forty.” He invented new iconography for the sexes – a phallic gargoyle for the male, and a classical urn for the female – and described each rising tier of the building in terms of the stunning realization.

Once awakened to sex, he continued to explore the theme with “The Blusea House,” a 1938 drawing that charted the formula for sexual orgasm, symbolized and measured by a variety of graphs, diagrams, and gauges. The absurdity of a lifelong virgin delineating this concept was not lost on Rizzoli, and he credited the fictitious Victor Betterlaugh, John McFrozen, and Von Der Maidenberg with counsel and observations.

In another series of works, Rizzoli invented an imaginary world exposition – modeled after the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition – with a detailed ground plan, and drawings of some 80 buildings and 20 statues. He called the exposition Y.T.T.E., for Yield to Total Elation. The shrines in the exposition were devoted to abstract concepts such as life, poetry, happiness, and matrimony, while more practical structures included the “Temple of Welcome,” an orientation center, and the “Acme Sitting Station,” the restrooms.

This is a show that is at various times beautiful, odd, startling, and claustrophobic. The claustrophobia tends to set in with those works that contain large passages of text, such as the pages from his various novellas. The buildings, no matter how strange, have a logic and a whimsy that is pleasing to the eye. The concepts that animate these drawings, however, are not always so pleasing to the mind, and when the concepts get the upper hand, the viewer feels himself being pulled into a maze of wordplay and incoherent ramblings.

But Rizzoli was original, to say the least. Artists who inhabit their own worlds can hardly help being so. But, unlike other primitive or outsider artists, he had a sophisticated graphic vocabulary with which to express himself, and this gives his work a persuasiveness not often found in this genre.

 

 The Museum of American Folk Art

1998

 

 

 

 

Spectacular Signs of Times Square

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For nearly a century, New York City has had a love-hate relationship with the signs of Times Square.

The famous “Camel Man” blowing smoke rings in Times Square

They’ve been alternately viewed as gaudy eyesores and a spectacular attraction, as a commercial blight and a wonder of the world. They earned Broadway its nickname “The Great White Way” and served as a stage set for corporate egos and the wizardry of electrical technicians.

When Japanese companies wanted to demonstrate their ascendance in the 1980s, they rented the biggest signs in Times Square and put the names “Panasonic” and “Mitsubishi” in shimmering, computer-controlled LED lights where “Wrigley’s Gum” and “Chevrolet” had once reigned supreme.

When plans for Times Square’s renovation took shape in the mid-Eighties, the lights became a focal point of debate. Preservationists and aesthetes – the same forces that in the early days had opposed the signs – waxed nostalgic. The signs were saved and provisions were made to set aside space for new ones on new buildings.

Had this not been the case, the signs would be history today, and the current exhibit at the New-York Historical Society – “Signs and Wonders: the Spectacular Lights of Times Square” – would have a funereal air about it. As is, the show is exuberant, confidently strutting its stuff through the decades, from the 50-foot Heinz pickle of 1898 to the steaming “Cup o’ Noodles” of today. The story is told mostly through archival photographs, with a few colorful mock-ups to give a sense of the real signs and so visitors can compare the different effects of neon, argon, incandescent, fluorescent, and LED (light-emitting diode) displays.

The show begins with the early 1900s, when Times Square (named for the newspaper and defined as the bow-tie shaped area between 42nd and 48th streets with Seventh Avenue and Broadway crossing at the knot) had begun to display billboard advertisements for the theaters and other neighborhood attractions. The signs became larger until they covered whole sides of buildings.

Things took off with the invention of the electric sign. The father of the “Great White Way” was O.J. Gude, an electrical engineer who, for many years, built almost all the spectacular signs in the Broadway area. His masterpiece was probably the block-long Wrigley’s sign on the Putnam building, between 43rd and 44th streets. It had flowing fountains, peacocks with 60-foot-long tails, floral motifs, and six 15-foot-high spearmen – symbol of the spearmint flavor.

In 1910, Ohio businessman Elwood Rice came to New York City with a plan to make the world’s biggest electric sign. Atop the Normandie Hotel he erected one that was 72 feet high and 90 feet wide and displayed a static chariot-racing scene from “Ben Hur,” a popular play of the time. He called it “Leaders of the World” and solicited paid messages from world leaders for the moving part of the sign. Few took him up on it, however, and after running service announcements for a time, Rice declared the sign a success and went back to Ohio.

The trick of putting animation in signs was discovered in the early 1900s. Bulbs were arranged in several overlapping images and lit in rapid sequence to create the illusion of movement. The best was the Corticelli Kitten at 42nd and Broadway. It leaped, twisted, and somersaulted as it played with a spool of thread, an image that conveyed the message that Corticelli silk thread did not tangle.

As signs became more extravagant, the backlash began. Designers and urban planners, troubled by the scale and garishness of the signs, tried to restrict them. In 1909, the Municipal Art Society succeeded in passing a law that restricted the size and location of signs, but it was abolished because the restrictions were based solely on aesthetics.

From 1930 to 1934, the glamorous Pepsodent girl – her outline based on a popular Ziegfield star – swung beneath a clock at the north end of Times Square. With every swing the clock lit up and lights flashed, a sequence that occurred with dizzying regularity every 10 seconds.

Neon was introduced in 1910 and proved a wonderfully versatile medium for spectacular signs because of its flexibility and vivid colors. But restrictive patents limited its use, and it wasn’t until 1936 that the city saw its first spectacular neon sign: Wrigley’s enormous underwater scene with tropical fish – some 42 feet long – swimming around a pack of gum.

It wasn’t very high tech, but steam – introduced in 1933 – has remained a wonderful special effect. For years, steam rose from a gigantic A&P coffee mug. Then there was the famous Camel man, who blew gigantic smoke rings over the square and donned a soldier’s uniform in 1942. Today, the steam rises from Cup o’ Noodles.

After World War II, the sign designer Artkraft Strauss dominated the Times Square spectaculars. It created the 1952 Canadian Club sign with its prismatic script letters suspended a foot in front of a gold neon background. The 1980s brought the introduction of computer-generated LED signs. Also on view are working models of the news “zipper” that lit up the headlines at One Times Square; the illuminated “T” of the Suntory whiskey ad of the 1980s; the new fiber-optic AT&T globe on the Marriott Marquis; and the current Coca-Colaad with the bottle that fills and drains itself.

But the best display, of course, is Times Square itself, where tourists can still look up and know by the razzle-dazzle that they’ve arrived in the Big Apple. Other places – Las Vegas, Tokyo – may have surpassed Times Square in sheer extravagance, but New York has the tradition.

The New-York Historical Society

1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graphic Design

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Remember when a sign was just a sign: “Drink Coke” with a picture of someone doing just that? Or, when a book cover was just the title of the book in simple block letters and maybe a picture of two people embracing? Or when every corporation and political group didn’t have a logo, or when children’s books didn’t mix 10 different typefaces, and newspapers were just black and white with no four-color charts and computer composite photographs?

Nostalgic for that world? It was only 15 years ago, but seems longer, so much has changed in graphic design since then. Whether you think the world is now over-designed, has gone crazy for sheer visual excitement over substance and clarity, or whether you think the once dull and unimaginative has been wonderfully enlivened, is no matter. Graphic design has a life and a will all its own now and no longer feels subservient to the underlying message once assumed to be its primary purpose.

“Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture,” at the newly redesigned Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is a gleeful, festive-looking exhibit that perfectly illustrates where we are today, and how we got there, while skirting the style-over-substance question that might engage a skeptic, or any thoughtful person. The very exhibit itself, with its jazzy installation on modern partitions that only partially obscure the dark, carved-wood interior of the old Andrew Carnegie mansion, seems to embody the sense of an energetic, almost virus-like aesthetic that has supplanted an earlier zeitgeist of dignity and decorum.

As organized by Ellen Lupton, the museum’s curator of contemporary design, this is an exhibit of which it might be said, as Marshall McLuhan did back in the Sixties, that the medium is the message. Among its amusing highlights is a full-scale newsstand with screaming tabloids and rows of candy boxes, of which the best is still the old classic pink-and-white Good and Plenty. Mostly though, this is a show that celebrates the vanguard of design, the screwball wristwatches of Tibor Kalman’s M & Company, or the cartoonish, underground look of wheat-pasted posters found on construction fences and blank walls in New York City.

The show is organized thematically, opening with a salute to “The Street,” the urban billboard, with its gigantically scaled advertisements for products, events, and political causes, and the hand-pasted rock and nightclub posters mounted in multiples like a sheet of stamps, recalling the repetitious aesthetic of Andy Warhol. Here, too, can be found a facsimile highway sign for Walt Disney World, which mixes highway-sign language with Disney’s stock-in-trade: Mickey Mouse peering over the top of a sign marking the exit to Disney World and MGM Studios.

The section on “Typography,” the design of letters, begins by showing how classic typefaces evolved, then leaps into the current revolutionary atmosphere in which letters have been bent, twisted, fractured, exploded, and pushed side by side with seemingly incompatible neighbors. Much of this is amusing, as when a letter or word is made to become the thing it expresses as in the splintered, edgy lettering of the word “Crackhouse,” by designer Jeremy Dean.

When letters begin to blur, and invert, and are organized on the page in radically non-linear arrangements, and when images and text are so fused – as in the work of Katherine McCoy, an influential teacher at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan – vertigo begins to set in, and the viewer feels thwarted in the effort to penetrate the design overload.

When this exhibit does ask questions, they are the kinds of questions that would only bother the fully converted, as in the section on “Identity,” which deals mostly with corporate logos. In the book that accompanies the show, Lupton ponders the appropriateness of a vanguard sensibility being appropriated by corporate America. But, after all, isn’t selling and commercialism what graphic design is all about?

Here we see the famous icon for Bell Telephone, which in the Sixties had a remarkable 93 percent recognition rate in the United States. But we also see logos for political groups, as well, such as that for ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, with its pink triangle over the slogan “Silence = Death.” The pink triangle recalls the pink tags sewn on the sleeves of homosexuals in Nazi prison camps, while its inversion is meant to suggest resistance and strength.

The exhibit concludes with “Publishing,” a section on books, displayed in Andrew Carnegie’s library and a small room outside it. Books, seemingly too staid to dance in this company on their own, are dangling from strings, as if to give them added animation. We do sense a little restraint in the design of the covers – you can almost always make out the title and the author – as if somewhere, in some publishing house, someone is still saying “Hey, this is a book, not a rock poster.”