Automobiles by Architects

by Ivan Margolius. Wiley-Academy,
London and New York, 2000.
148 pp., illus. Paper, $60.00.
ISBN 0-471-60786-X.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens.
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, Iowa
USA.
ballast@netins.net

As a commuter, I drive back and forth to work almost daily. Seated at the steering wheel of my fuel efficient vehicle, accompanied by music and coffee, I often feel as if my car is a shell-like mobile house, or "architecture on wheels," as author Ivan Margolius suggests in this elegant, interesting volume about automobiles designed by architects. Emerging at the same time as Modernism in art and architecture, the automobile, he writes, became a "metaphor for modernity." Architects fell head over heels for it, and (despite the enormous distinctions between buildings and cars) surprisingly often regarded it as "an opportunity for an exercise in miniature architecture." Among the earliest and most prolific was Frank Lloyd Wright, who insisted on owning American cars, the bodies of which he redesigned and invariably painted in Cherokee red. ("Mobility, argued Wright, should be like a school of fish, all working together. The American automobile, he felt, lacked that quality.") Other architect-car designers included Josef Maria Olbrich, Adolf Loos, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Pierre-Jules Boulanger (who once described his Citroen as "an umbrella on four wheels"), Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Norman Bel Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Carlo Mollino, and Renzo Piano. The accounts of their excursions into transportation design are fascinating, but just as entrancing are the plentiful visual examples of forms that they created: A plywood model, for instance, of a simple and stunningly beautiful car by Le Corbusier (called Voiture Minimum); the ghostly shells of three dust-covered Citroens (discovered in a barn in France); or a wonderfully graceful yet comical bus by Jan Kaplicky that completely wraps around the book. The author is a Czech-born architect and writer who fled that country in 1966, and now lives and practices in London. The idea for this project came as he was gathering material for earlier books on Cubism and Czech architecture and design.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 1,
Autumn 2002.)