Masters Of Car Design

Close to 400 photographs in this handsome volume capture the excitement of automotive history, spotlighting the most innovative and important car design and their manufacturers, include many famous American models. Illustrations and words combine to re-create the adventures of designing the legendary cars that evolved into today’s indispensable, stylish, and efficient automobile. From Ghia, Farina, Giugiaro, and Bertone to General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, Masters of Car Design traces the evolution of car production, while spectacular archival and specially commissioned photographs showcase the cutting-edge designs that have earned these manufacturers a major place in automotive history. A superb gift for automotive enthusiasts, this book brings to life classic car models and their designers with fantastic photographs taken by famous car photographers.

With 400 pages, this reference work, published for the first time in this form, offers a comprehensive and informative look at the development of European, American and Japanense car design from 1947 to 2004. Past, present and future design trends are shown with examples of original photos from 370 series of vehicles and concept cars. A biographical overview of leading, international car designers is included. Book jacket.

This beautifully designed and illustrated essential guide to car design from Motorbooks' Speed Read series traces the inspirations of the first car designers and tracks the craft, the art, and the science that have propelled successive generations of designers and shaped the contours of the vehicles we see all around us. Never before has the car-buying public been more aware of how a car's design fits into their everyday lives and what it communicates about the driver behind the wheel. Like all design, car design is complex subject. Every part of a car represents myriad decisions by the design team ruled by engineering, aesthetics, human interface, and emotion. Speed Read Car Design helps the you understand the hows and whys of that design process, offering an engaging review of history, theory, key concepts, and key designers. It’s a book for car enthusiasts, design fans, and anyone with a desire to better understand why our wheeled world looks the way it does. In sections divided by topic, you'll explore the birth of car design, how it evolved over the last century, successes and failures in innovation, the elements that make up a car's style, the engineering behind the design, the creative process and design fads, and finally the road ahead in car design. Each section ends with a glossary of related terms, and informational sidebars provide fun facts, historical tidbits, and mini-bios of key people in car design. Sleek illustrations of the cars give clear design examples throughout. With Motorbooks’ Speed Read series, become an instant expert in a range of fast-moving subjects, from Formula 1 racing to the Tour de France. Accessible language, compartmentalized sections, fact-filled sidebars, glossaries of key terms, and event timelines deliver quick access to insider knowledge. Their brightly colored covers, modern design, pop art–inspired illustrations, and handy size make them perfect on-the-go reads.

A colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house “a machine for living,” was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his “white phase” of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for “a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality,” the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier's energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced. This book is the first to tell the full and true story of Le Corbusier's adventure in automobile design. Architect Antonio Amado describes the project in detail, linking it to Le Corbusier's architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He provides abundant images, including many pages of Le Corbusier's sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier's letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier's design is often said to have been the inspiration for Volkswagen's enduringly popular Beetle; the architect himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. Amado Lorenzo, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way. Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier's career, Le Corbusier did not. This book, lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, restores Le Corbusier's automobile to the main text.

Can a person race a car without an engine? You sure can. With the help of gravity and unique car design, soap box derby stock car drivers get to experience the thrill of the race. In 1914, Charlie Chaplain's movie "The Kid Auto Races at Venice" exposed Americans to the sport of soap box derby racing. Kids began racing cars whenever they could. When a newspaper photographer organized a race in 1933, the sport really took off. Readers learn about the races, heroes, scandals, and intense competition in this sport for kids and teens. A glossary, color photographs, and fact boxes round out this exciting book.

That Marcello Gandini is one of the greatest of automobile designers ever has never been disputed, and whether he is the greatest ever, only time and the directions automobile design takes, will tell. But there is no doubting Marcello Gandini?s immense impact on automobile design in the last four decades of the 20th century that still remains valid well into the 21st century. the Lamborghini Miura to the Maserati Quattroporte IV, the humble Innocenti Mini to the epic Cizeta V16T, Marcello Gandini has designed some of the most epochal of all automobiles. Iconic cars like the first-generation BMW 5 Series, the Audi 50/VW Polo, the Fiat X1/9, the Lamborghini Countach and the Diablo, the Lancia Stratos, the Renault Magnum super truck, and many others have all flowed his stylistic pen. -- Designing automobiles that really defined the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, even the 1990s, Marcello Gandini is, arguably, the one man who had the greatest impact, the one who changed automotive design the most.

Showing where car designers look for inspiration when envisioning cars of the future, and how they respond to the demands of the market, this title dissects the process of designing these imaginary flights of fancy from idea to realization.