Art Center Finds a Car Design Rival
If most new cars look alike, you can credit that at least in part to auto designers who all came from the same classrooms at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. But now the world-renowned institution is going to get some formidable competition.
In a bid to establish itself as an influential player in auto design, the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, a private, for-profit art school founded in 1929, is starting a program in auto styling.
“Cars today are so mass-manufactured that there is no real sculpture in them anymore,” said Jeff Teague, director of Academy’s industrial design department and its new automotive program. “We’ve lost personality and soul.”
Academy of Art represents a major new intellectual challenge to the dominance of Art Center on automotive design during the last several decades. As many as half the estimated 2,500 professional automotive designers in the world call the Pasadena college their alma mater.
The new school could help boost California’s already formidable role in auto design: There are 20 vehicle design studios in Southern California, the largest concentration in the world, drawn in part because of Art Center’s presence.
If successful, the Academy of Art could promote development of a Northern California car design center and certainly would add a different flavor to the designs now coming out of California, industry insiders say.
Ronald C. Hill, chairman of Art Center’s Transportation Design Department since 1985 and former chief designer for General Motors Corp.’s Chevrolet, Pontiac and Buick divisions, says the “sameness” debate has been swirling for years. But he maintains that his program is not the villain.
Indeed, consumers and auto critics have been complaining in vain that both domestic and imported cars are too similar. The trend started with the 1970s energy crisis, when designers were forced to adopt a basic aerodynamic envelope to improve fuel efficiency. Federal impact standards for bumpers added to the problem.
The economics of rising world competition also compromised auto makers’ willingness to take risks and turn out nonconformist cars. And some experts say the common educational background of designers has only reinforced all the other ingredients of sameness.
Even one of its most famous alumni, New Beetle designer J. Mays--now Ford Motor Co.’s vice president of design--says that the sheer number of Art Center grads has caused a sameness to creep into automotive design in the U.S.
The issue of design conformity might seem like a teapot tempest to those outside the car world, but without the change and visual excitement that a wide variety of design ideas brings to the marketplace, customers stop buying cars and the ripple effects hurt the entire economy.
“As manufacturers get closer to parity in terms of reliability and quality, the two things that will distinguish them are styling and the image their products project,” said analyst George C. Peterson, president of Santa Ana-based AutoPacific Inc. “That’s one reason Chrysler has been so successful. . . . Its cars have a tremendous amount of sex appeal.”
Teague, a 1978 Art Center graduate, spent seven years with Ford, seven more at Mitsubishi’s U.S. design studio in Cypress and three years as chief of design for Volkswagen in Germany. He also ran VW’s North American studio in Simi Valley for about a year.
“I could try to make this another Art Center, but that’s not what I want,” he said. “I believe in variety.”
He also wants Academy designers to come away with “a firm understanding of the automotive culture and history. I’m trying to infuse gasoline into their DNA.”
Art Center, founded as an advertising art school in 1930, added its transportation design program in 1950. Since then, it has produced designers whose work includes the fins on the 1957 Cadillac Eldorado and the hubcaps on the first Ford Mustang in 1964. Its alumni came up with the shapes of the Nissan Quest minivan, the retro Mazda Miata roadster, Volkswagen’s New Beetle and the seminal Ford Taurus--the car that introduced the “jellybean” look.
It may be years before Teague’s efforts show results--the four-year car design program started classes Sept. 1 with just 16 students, 10 of them freshmen.
But many auto design studio heads are excited at the prospect of another talent pool.
“As Art Center graduates have been placed in positions throughout Detroit, there is a certain sameness” in the cars coming out of their studios, said Ford design chief Mays. Teague’s European design perspective “is sorely needed,” he said.
But Art Center also has plenty of defenders, among them Toyota’s head U.S. designer, who say it is not common education at fault in the lack of distinctive designs on the road today.
Design students come from such a variety of ethnic, geographic and economic backgrounds, said David Hackett, director of Toyota’s Calty studio in Newport Beach, that it is unlikely they could ever be channeled into the same creative thinking patterns by their professors.
While Art Center students influence each other and have some uniformity, Hackett said, “once they come into the companies’ studios, they adapt to the culture of that company.”
That is a vital ingredient in the equation, said Wayne K. Cherry, vice president of design for GM’s North American operations and a 1962 Art Center graduate: “Cars shouldn’t look alike, [and] with a clearly distinguished brand identity, they don’t.”
At Art Center, which made its name designing for the future, Hill takes criticism in stride.
“San Francisco is not a hotbed of auto design,” he said. “In Southern California, there has always been a car culture, from the classic coach builders of the 1920s and ‘30s to the hot-rod and custom-car movements to all the design studios that have been started here.”
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