Wheels of Fortune : Pasadena’s Art Center,the Automotive World’s Leading Design School
HENRYJUSKEVICIUS WAS ALWAYS crazy about cars. When he was 10, he built a three-wheel vehicle powered by a lawn-mower engine. His weekends as a teen-ager were spent helping friends customize their cars. To Juskevicius, nothing could be grander than becoming a designer of cars.
His mother, trying to steer her 16-year-old son in the right direction, gave him “Wheels,” Arthur Hailey’s novel about the automobile industry. One passage in particular stuck in his mind: “The ranks of auto company designers were heavy with expatriate Californians whose route to Detroit . . . had been through the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles.” If Art Center was half as important to becoming an auto designer as Hailey suggested, then, Juskevicius thought, “that’s the place to go.” He wrote for information.
No other school of design has had such influence in the field of auto design during the past four decades as Art Center. Throughout the industry it is known as the No. 1 school for auto design. Auto companies look to it as a major supplier of imaginative, young talent. In fact, half of the designers working for Detroit’s Big Three in 1984 were Art Center graduates. As Tom Gale, Chrysler’s vice president of product design, says, “Art Center is very, very special in our mind.”
Yet Art Center maintains a relatively low profile. There are those who live just down the street from its secluded, 176-acre Pasadena campus who don’t even know it exists. First-time visitors, winding their way up the quiet, residential, two-lane road to the college, are likely to miss its entrance. The college’s main facility is a single, striking, long rectangular structure spanning two hilltops. Diagonal steel struts support exterior walkways, giving the building a skeletal appearance. (Art Center leases additional classroom and studio space in Pasadena’s Old Town neighborhood.) To the east and south, beyond the school’s grassy sculpture garden, is a sweeping view of Pasadena cut up by freeways.
Art Center offers its 1,150 students 10 majors, but it is distinguished by its auto-design program. Those in charge, however, do not think of Art Center as mass-producing auto designers. “Our role is to identify those students who have the creative talent to be able to do those things beyond the normal scheme of reference, to be able to make that creative leap to do that that hasn’t been done before,” says Ronald C. Hill, Art Center’s industrial-design chairman. “We provide a framework within a dense and compact curriculum to build their skills in communication and to nurture their creative skills.” In other words, Art Center doesn’t teach talent--it primes existing talent to be productive for the student and society. And that was Edward Adams’ intention. “Tink” Adams, as his friends knew him, was a successful New York advertising designer and illustrator during the late 1920s. He had studied at Chicago’s Art Institute and American Academy of Art. But his education, Adams believed, hadn’t prepared him for a professional career. After moving to Los Angeles, Adams, in 1930, founded a school to bridge the gap between the academic and professional worlds.
At first, the school, then located in Los Angeles, offered courses primarily in commercial and fine art. The department of industrial design and the transportation-design major were added in 1946. The new program, headed by former General Motors’ designer George Jergenson, was the only one of its kind in the country and put Art Center well ahead of other design schools. “For a long time,” says Hill, “Art Center was about the only institution teaching auto design per se.” Only within the last 20 years have programs at other schools, such as Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies, come close to equaling that of Art Center’s.
Art Center also differed from other design schools because Adams required its faculty to be working professionals: Those teaching transportation design at Art Center are either consultants, owners of their own design studios or staff designers with one of the major auto companies. It’s a policy that has received high marks from the auto makers. “The school is only as good as its instructors,” says Jack Telnack, chief design executive at Ford Motor Co. and an Art Center alum. “Being involved in the real world of design keeps them completely in tune so that they can direct students in a more meaningful way.”
HARRY BRADLEY spent 17 years as a designer with General Motors. He now heads his own design studio, Bradley Automotive Design & Illustration in Palos Verdes, and works as a consultant with Japanese and European auto makers. On Thursdays, however, Bradley teaches Advanced Transportation Design for sixth- and seventh-term students at Art Center. (Eight terms are needed to graduate. The school operates three terms every 12 months so that students can complete their degrees in 32 months.)
Bradley’s class bears little resemblance to the typical lecture-style college classroom. Students mill around the room in groups of five or six. Long drawing tables are cluttered with pens, art tools, papers and portfolios. Colored sketches of futuristic four-wheel dream machines, neatly taped everywhere on the walls of the windowless room, are arranged to show them off to their best advantage. Car talk permeates the air. As one student puts it: “We don’t love cars. We’re obsessed with cars.”’
Bradley is a trim, stylishly dressed, well-tanned, gray-bearded man. His students address him by his first name. The informality is part of Bradley’s way of encouraging students to open up and share opinions about their designs. “I want them to understand that they should exchange ideas, because they can really grow and mature through open discussion of their likes and dislikes,” he says. “I try to get them to understand that the auto-design studio is a team situation.” Re-creating the professional environment in the classroom, as Bradley does, was Adams’ idea. Explains Strother MacMinn, one of Art Center’s longtime auto-design instructors: “By giving them a close association with the professional setting, students become aware of the opportunities, responsibilities, heritage and state of their art, and through that they get an awareness of their future potential.”
Art Center deadlines are demanding, and students learn early on how to manage their time--especially to survive beyond what is known as the “killer second term.” Strother MacMinn’s second-term Development of Form class, for instance, requires students to produce four models and their prerequisite drawings in 15 weeks. “There are a lot of all-nighters because there just isn’t enough time to do everything,” says second-term student Jacques Rey. Instructors insist on the best paper, the best watercolors, the best materials available for every assignment. The cost is often expensive, but, says Art Center alumnus Tom Matano, now chief designer with Mazda (North America), “you always know what the highest quality is.”
This focus on professionalism, hard work and self-discipline has earned Art Center the respect of the auto companies. “When we hire a student, we say that they hit the beach running,” says Ford’s Telnack. “We expect them to be capable of carrying on the type of work our experienced people are doing so that they’re productive right from day one. Art Center has continued to turn out the kind of people we require.”
EACH YEAR,companies such as GM and French auto maker Citroen sponsor student design projects. The companies provide grant money, either on an annual or per project basis, to cover the cost of materials needed and to defray other operating expenses. The program further strengthens the relationship between Art Center and the auto manufacturers and also endows the school with important funding.
Last spring, the Saturn Corp. design staff of General Motors asked Bradley’s class to create a line of Saturn cars. The only stipulation was that the cars be small, include a sedan, be relatively inexpensive and be GM’s answer to the imports. For the students, the assignment was, as Bradley puts it, “uncharted territory.”
The Thursday class is a daylong studio session, as are many of the transportation-design classes (academic classes meet at night). For the Saturn project, the class divided into seven design teams. First they mapped out the existing market and concluded that, besides the sedan, Saturn needed a sports commuter, an urban transporter, an inexpensive sports car and a luxury coupe. Upon completing dozens of preliminary sketches and renderings, the students had presented their ideas to visiting Saturn designers and were about to begin constructing three-dimensional clay or foam models. They only need Bradley’s final OK.
Bradley starts his review with Team A and moves down the wall full of drawings. Some students, waiting for Bradley’s critique, use the spare time to start construction of their models in the shop area across the hall. Others take a break in the school cafeteria.
It’s not quite 11 a.m. when four of the five members from Team B in Bradley’s class dismiss themselves to the cafeteria. They sit together at a window table and eyed the cars in the faculty parking lot. “See the difference between that Trans Am’s rear lights and the BMW’s?” asks team member Roger Flores. “That’s an example of the difference between a car that’s been designed as a whole and one that’s made of different components.” His teammates, Stanley Liu,Angela Knoop and Bryan Furumoto, nod in agreement.
Flores’ teammates describe him as an “advanced concept thinker.” His designs are not of next year’s car models but are fantasies of generations of cars to come. An experimental Citroen BX sedan that he conceived during the fall term’s Advanced Transportation class, for instance, featured a Y-shaped roof with black glass that, at the front, softly curved over the top and tapered to a sharp ridge at the back. “Citroen said they’d never seen anything like it,” Flores says proudly.
Back in the classroom, Bradley comes to Henry Juskevicius’ 19 drawings. Juskevicius, now 30, is one term away from completing his degree at Art Center. Since the time he read about Art Center in Hailey’s novel, he’s earned a bachelor’s degree in design--as have one-fourth of the school’s 70 auto-design majors--and spent three years working for a design firm in his hometown of Toronto. (Some students, in fact, are currently employed by an auto company and are sent to Art Center at company expense. Foreign auto makers, particularly, send their staff people to Art Center in order to keep up on trends in automotive design in this country.)
Juskevicius has designed an urban transporter for his team. His van-like vehicle seats four. Its lower body is to be made of sheet metal, the upper half largely of curved black glass. The “war zone,” which Juskevicius defines as the area nearest the ground receiving the most collision damage, is to be constructed of a durable but easily replaceable blow-molded plastic. Being able to justify a design and to translate the reasons into language that company executives will understand is one of the criteria for being a good designer. It’s part of what Bradley calls the “fine art of corporate survival.”
“I’m trying to emphasize the user and the people more than the look,” Juskevicius explains. “The look isn’t the only thing the consumer’s going to buy.”
Bradley regards Juskevicius’ designs for a moment, then counters: “The designer’s biggest responsibility is to come up with something new, a new design. It can be subtle or something dramatic. What I think you need to do is to establish the sense of power of these earlier proposals in your later designs. Give this line something with a little more movement and romance,” he suggests.
Juskevicius, his arms folded in front of him, mulls over the comments. “I wanted this van to be able to carry a refrigerator. Americans move more than any other people in the world, so it’s got to carry a refrigerator.”
“Yes, but the point is that inefficiency works in our society,” Bradley argues. “You’re trying to introduce a rationality that Americans have no need for.”
No matter how naive, outlandish or impractical a student’s idea strikes anyone else, those in the auto industry take it very seriously. Ford, for example, was so impressed with student Derek Millsap’s version of the Ford Bronco truck that it is building a full-size, fiberglass model of it. Although Ford’s decision to put a student design into the beginning stages of production is a first for Art Center, Bradley says, “it’s not at all unusual for a company to find answers or solutions that they can use.”
More often, however, auto makers view the sponsorship program at Art Center as a scouting expedition and as a way to try out emerging talent. “It’s one of the best means for us to support the school and to expose students to the real world of design,” explains Ford’s Telnack. “We’re also interested in looking at the talent that’s there so, come graduation day, we know who to look for and who to make offers to.”
And there are offers. Of the 54 transportation-design students who graduated in the last two years, 40% were hired for jobs in their chosen field. Considering that major companies such as Ford have only three or four openings a year on their design staffs, the number is remarkable. That track record is one reason aspiring designers are so eager to attend Art Center. “They see the success of past graduates and see the writing on the wall,” says instructor MacMinn. “That’s what drives these kids.”
