American Classics : College Students in Pasadena Design Cars of Future
In the sylvan hills of Pasadena, high above the smog and traffic that ensnarl motorists, a group of young car designers is summoned for a briefing.
Their mission: Design a vehicle that will enhance the enjoyment of road travel through the West. They christen it The Sunset Project.
Three months later, the designers reassemble. As Yasushi Kato gets up to speak, all eyes turn to his model, made of sculpted clay and painted a lustrous red. With its sharp contours that mix space bubble design with a covered wagon look, this vehicle looks ready to blast into orbit.
“When I first heard about The Sunset Project, it reminded me of the Western frontier in the 1880s,” Kato tells the other designers, some of whom wear ponytails, cowboy boots and suits.
“But do Americans today have the frontier spirit?” he continued. “No. . . . They are couch potatoes. So why not stop being couch potatoes with my car? It has a wild image. It is a car for the neo-frontiersman. It will allow Americans to regain their frontier spirit.”
This isn’t a New Age seminar for burned-out auto executives.
It’s Art Center College of Design, a modest institution of exceptional caliber, which industry experts say is quietly turning out half of the car designers working today in the United States.
In a survey last July, Art Center was ranked the top U.S. school in both industrial and graphic design by Wefler & Associates, a design and research firm in Evanston, Ill. Art Center also boasts one of the nation’s top car design departments, an honor it shares with Detroit’s Center For Creative Studies.
Today, as California car culture takes on almost mythic stature among auto designers in search of new trends, Art Center has become one of the touchstones of the industry, an automotive Oracle at Delphi where car companies go to jump-start the future.
“It’s one of the few windows we can come through to see American life,” said Tom Matano, an Art Center alumnus and a vice president of Mazda who heads the firm’s California design studio. “The sheer energy and passion and power of the students and the unrestricted creativity at Art Center is something you can’t get in Japan.”
Executives from Citroen to Toyota regularly make the pilgrimage to Art Center’s glass and steel campus--designed by Southern California architect Craig Ellwood in the International style--in search of new talent and inspiration.
And increasingly, they sponsor “blue sky” projects, in which students are asked to dream up new cars or update old ones. Last May, Volvo flew out its top three designers from Goteborg, Sweden, to brief students on a project to design a “socially conscious” Volvo for the 1990s.
This fall, seniors designed a Mitsubishi Eclipse for the year 2000. Mitsubishi wanted a car that would accommodate business and leisure activities and navigate the clotted city streets of the future. Students were told that 60% of the buyers would be women.
And The Sunset Project? It was sponsored by Sunset Magazine, a periodical devoted to life in the American West. Juniors in advanced transportation design competed for $4,500 in prize money.
The object of all this isn’t to produce viable market products, but to let firms tap into ideas unfettered by corporate ideology, said Ron Hill, the chairman of Art Center’s industrial design department and one of General Motors’ chief designers for 22 years.
Blue sky projects also give individual students a chance to impress future employers.
“I’m up there every couple months either interviewing or visiting, and I find it stimulating,” said Thomas Tremont, an Art Center alumnus and chief designer at Chrysler Pacifica, the car company’s design studio in Carlsbad, Calif. “Young student designers don’t have the constraints that working for a company can give you.”
Students go from paper sketches to computer modeling and, finally, to 3-D clay models built to one-fifth scale and painted with real automotive colors. They even test the aerodynamic capabilities of their model cars in a wind tunnel. Design projects run from $25,000 to $50,000 depending on their size and complexity. But firms consider it a cheap investment.
Art Center produced three of the five designers of the Mazda Miata--one of the most critically acclaimed car designs of the decade.
And Art Center is where Japanese car companies, such as Nissan, Mazda and Honda, send their promising young designers to percolate in unbridled freedom and creativity--the antithesis of corporate Japan.
“I’m a student now, not a designer. I can do anything I want and that is very fun for me,” said Kato, 34, one of the top designers for Toyota Motors of Japan. He is studying transportation design at Art Center for a year at the behest of his employer.
The pollination goes both ways: Japanese firms are now hiring Art Center’s best students to design in Japan.
Art Center’s links to Japan were forged in the early 1970s, when the Japanese saw California as a safe oasis from the hostility generated by large-scale automotive industry layoffs in Detroit, said Carl Olsen, chairman of transportation design at the Center For Creative Studies.
Mazda’s Matano, who went to Art Center from Japan in the 1970s, said the school taught him to translate his engineering ideas into drawings and 3-D models. He said it was a rigorous process.
“The school was so hard; you’re never going to face more than that,” said Matano, who along with the better-known designer Mark Jordan helped design the Miata.
Indeed, the 90 students majoring in transportation design--out of a total student body at Art Center of 1,150--are told to forget about their social life for several years.
“The commitment is quite total,” said Hill, an alumnus. “We don’t have a basketball team. We don’t have fraternities or sororities. It’s incredibly difficult, but if you get through the program, it marks a student for life as far as their design capabilities go.”
Graduates don’t walk out of Art Center as superstars; they earn an average starting salary of about $35,000 per year in the United States and up to $45,000 in Europe, Hill said. But exceptional students are sometimes wooed by up to seven firms at once.
Right now, car companies “are just wailing for women,” Hill said. Only three of Art Center’s 90 transportation design students are female, but car companies hope their numbers will increase because they think female designers can dream up automotive styles that women like.
Art Center teaches a more international style of design than Detroit’s Center For Creative Studies, Hill said. The Japanese influence is very strong, and students are encouraged to spend a term studying at Art Center’s other campus in Vevey, Switzerland. Many also take a term off to work car company internships.
Olsen, chairman of transportation design at the Detroit center, said his school also maintains strong ties with European firms. He challenges the assumption that the Center For Creative Studies teaches “a Detroit world view” and is skeptical of the importance of California design.
“The California niche influence is rather peripheral,” Olsen said.
Some Art Center students in turn speak disparagingly of Detroit. Many don’t want to work there.
Dave Triano, 24, who is attending Art Center on a Ford Motor Co. scholarship, calls U.S. car companies “large, obese animals that are moving much too slowly.” He adds that “it’s very frustrating. Because we’d like to see American companies succeed.”
In between finals last month, several students hung around the classroom and boasted good-naturedly that they soon would outshine even the designers of the Miata.
Many had been up for several nights, putting finishing touches on their models. After their presentations, several students lay like slabs of meat across classroom tables, passed out cold from exhaustion.
After Christmas break, they would be back for more, living out the fantasies of every boy who ever doodled the outline of his favorite roadster on a PeeChee folder.
Andy Ogden, who teaches advanced transportation design, gestures toward the sleek models inspired by The Sunset Project. Some have soft, rounded edges. Others are less contoured, more aggressive. They range in color from turquoise to purple and red.
“Most of the pieces probably will not turn into usable designs,” Ogden said. “But from them may sprout the seed of an idea.”
