ArtCenter Classic 2018

By Wallace Wyss

Photos by Richard Bartholomew and Wallace Wyss

The ArtCenter College of Design Car Classic is not billed as a concours. And it’s not. It is more of a collection of cars curated anew each year to make a statement.

This year the event at their hilltop campus had one big emphasis — to celebrate the work of its graduates who had achieved something in automotive styling.

Several of the successful Design graduates came to the show with the car they designed or to talk about their experiences as a designer. Originally the ArtCenter did not start out as a car design school, and even today that is only part of its curriculum choices. But it does train about half to 70% of the world’s car designers.

Most impressive was the fact that two of its graduates were displaying cars that are on the leading edge of the electric car movement. Tesla, whose cars are designed by Franz Von Holzhausen, (who also designed the Solstice while at GM) and a new Fisker car, designed by a graduate Hendrik Fisker.

Not lost on us was the salesmanship effort of his beautiful daughter, who is working at the firm trying to make the purchase of the new Fisker car a personalized experience. Fisker’s new car was not only gullwinged in the back doors, but had lift forward doors in the front, two kinds of unusual doors in one car!

The range of other cars shown included Studebakers, a 1963 Thunderbird Sports Roadster, a yellow De Tomaso Mangusta, a Chrysler Atlantic dream car (which reportedly sprung out of a sketch on a cocktail napkin by former Chrysler exec Bob Lutz) and another Chrysler dream car, the Chronos.

Now some of the cars were “ordinary” in the sense they are common, like the Miata, but again it was an ArtCenter grad, Mark Jordan, son of famed GM designer Chuck Jordan, who designed it.

In the “novelty” category you would have to put the car driven by Jay Leno. It might have been a prewar Rolls-Royce but the impressive thing was the V12 engine, reportedly a Merlin engine out of a WWII fighter aircraft. It gets about 4 mpg!

Matt Stone, author and emcee, did a great interview from the stage of a half dozen now famous car designers who are grads of ArtCenter, and got some insights as to how design has changed. There were several other speeches and panel discussions and one of them was on the future of car design.

One of the discussion participants was Peter Brock, who was displaying not only a modern version of his Daytona coupe, the car that won for Shelby before the GT40 came along, but a mid-engined race car, the P70, that he designed for deTomaso. Originally Brock explained, the car was a Shelby-DeTomaso project but de Tomaso and Shelby had a falling out and deTomaso brought the car out as his own project; but looking back, was a radical and pleasing design. Brock was signing a recently published book about this project. (read review)

Some of the displays were a bit mystifying. There were two Singer Porsche prototypes, and while maybe that firm has an ArtCenter grad, I couldn’t see the connection with ArtCenter other than that Singer is pointing the way toward “restomods” in sports car as where you take an old body and fit it out with all the latest stuff.

There was a classic prewar car from the Mullin Museum. The relationship between the Mullins, true connoisseurs of classic prewar cars, and ArtCenter has recently resulted with the opening of a new building for Art Center in a downtown Pasadena location that has its own art gallery.

I have been to this show before but this was the first time I saw legions of art students taking advantage of the layout of the cars to sit down and sketch. Not all were Transporation Design students, some were illustration students. And no doubt some of those sporting cameras at 7 am (my usual time of arrival at concours everywhere) were photography students.

THE AUTHOR: Wallace Wyss is a historian and fine artist, currently doing portraits of prewar classics. For a sampling of work available on canvas, contact mendoart7@gmail.com