L'Enfant Terrible: Our Love Affair With Automobile Design

The car is the most cherished and admired of all contemporary objects, and car design is one of the distinctive, even defining art forms of the twenty-first century. The evolution of car design is a story of fantastic inventiveness. Within the simple constraints of the unchanging architecture of the automobile, its wheels, seats and engine, metal and plastic and glass-have been transformed to express freedom, style, sex, and power. In terms of aesthetics, it is a story of how the disparate forms of the primitive horseless carriage became integrated into a sculptural whole. Only rock music and the movies (with which the car has so very much in common) can compare with the cultural impact of the designed automobile.