Table of Contents
Introduction
Foreword by Chuck Jordan
1 The Gospel of Earl
2 An Ambitious Crowd
3 Design Progress
4 Techniques: From wood and plaster to fiberglass to virtual reality
5 Dreaming Big
6 Divers Assignments
7 The War Years
8 Goodbye to Wallflowers
Epilogue by Bill Porter
Appendix I: Styling's Special Communique
Appendix II: “The Story of GM Styling: The Start of Something Big”
[From Chapter Three: Design Progress]
Given frames of reference like the special cars Styling developed, given
facilities and techniques for doing the job in the best possible way, given the
leadership and talent necessary, you still do not leap and bound forward in the
automotive design business. That is because car styling, like any development in
history, must inevitably reflect a struggle.
On one side are those who make daring changes, who would build the advanced kind
of creation they know in their hearts is right and sound.
On the other are those who see dangers in moving too fast. They realize that
public preferences change slowly. They are keenly conscious of the huge costs of
preparing a new design for production. They constantly measure the gamble of
change against the bitter penalties that go with an automotive model failure. So
they may well say “No” to the newest ideas.
Both protagonists are right. And both recognize the validity of the other’s
position. Their concern centers over where they should meet each other at each
development stage of the styling theme. Automotive design, then, must be a
continuing dispute between the traditionalists and the exponents of change.
Naturally enough, the Styling Section was always the advocate for the newest
approach. It battled stoutly for its ideas. Often the fight was been long,
sometimes momentarily, fruitless – but always it made at least one notch of
headway for the long pull. The broad goals of designing progress, sighted on
every horizon ahead by the Section’s far-seeing eyes, have nearly all proved
themselves good by the one final measurement of validity and quality – success
in the marketplace. The exceptions that test a conclusion like that are few and
far between.
Right from its beginnings, the Section had had an illustrious succession of
innovations to its credit. Too, it has created important variations and notable
improvements on ideas that began elsewhere. In a field where nobody can hope to
originate every single idea, an added test of merit is the ability to adapt
outside ideas that are good and to shun others without merit. On the basis of
its own achievements and its alertness to valid approaches from outside,
Styling’s record stands closer to preeminence than most others’.
That record starts right at the beginning of the Art & Colour days. Cars of that
period were still design hangovers from the carriage era – tall, erect,
ungainly. From the first day at work, when the designers began to conceive
automobiles that were different and smart and new, the ideas that resulted were
fresh, distinctive, different.
Earl insisted this be so. He was always impatient with a job that was not right
artistically, and he fought intensely for his ideas – with his own people inside
the Section, with others when he brought them what the Section had created.
Early he fixed a highly dissatisfied eye on the 74-inch height of the typical
model of the late twenties. But his hopes ran into opposition. The engineers
told him among other objections, that height reduction was impractical from a
structural standpoint.
So, in 1929, he proved it could be done. He brought two Cadillac chassis to an
engineering showing. They were identical. Welders walked onto the stage with
torches, acetylene tanks and masks. Then, in full sight of the audience, they
cut one frame, re-welded it differently, and finished up with the structural
members so arranged that the body could be mounted four inches lower. GM execs
and technicians looked, blinked, nodded agreement and ordered the lower job into
production.
But bodies still rose 70 inches or so off the ground. They could be lowered only
in steps of fractional inches from then on. Road clearance was a factor.
Structure, too, became a more valid problem, for bodies of that day were
positioned far differently than now. The front of the radiator lay directly
above the front axle and the body sat well back on the frame – the seat of the
rear compartment on a sedan, in fact, was placed precisely over the rear axle.
That lateral positioning on the axles left no physical way to lower the body.
Yet Earl was insistent. What happened as a result is one of those completely
fascinating successions of interlocked developments that must always occur with
good designing. This must imply good engineering as well, and must promise,
therefore, that the final result will be good in all respects.
The only way the body could be lowered was to cradle the seating compartments
between the axles, not on top of them. So the designers began to edge the body
forward, providing room to do it by advancing the motor as well. The new,
between-axles ride immeasurably improved passenger comfort. The relocated body
could then be lowered inch by inch, enhancing its appearance. The look of added
length could then be improved still more by the beginning, then the actual
development, of a rear deck, ultimately large enough to accommodate spare tire
and luggage – and the disappearance of the spare from the outside of the car
further clarified and bettered its sweep of line. Then, as body lowering
continued, it finally became possible to eliminate running boards, which in one
stroke improved looks and saved a substantial item of expense.
What more intricate sequence of design, comfort and cost improvement could be
imagined? And it sprang from the fundamentally sound artistic desire for a
lowered car.
Intertwining of artistic and engineering advances can be seen over and over
again. The all-steel top provided another dramatic example.
The Section’s first use of all-steel tops (aside from the highly tentative work
for Vauxhall in 1929) came in the Knudsen Fair job of 1933. That special job,
like so many since, was a convenient means of testing and research. But it did
not quite solve the problem.
It, like a scattering of other all-steel tops that had appeared experimentally
outside of General Motors, was a box-like lid perched on bows of wood, which in
turn rested on the straight pillars rising from the beltline. All of them added
strength to the car, but no whit of beauty. And they drummed. The metal sheet
was thin, and under a car’s vibration it oscillated minutely to the point that
its rumble became a prime problem for bodymakers.
Fisher’s Turret Top of 1935, the first mass-production application of an
all-steel roof, was given line and grace by the Section that served to solve the
drumming problem. The means was as simple as it was artistically right. Instead
of a flat section of sheet mounted on the pillars, the designers had crowned the
top, endowing it with a nearly imperceptible, gently compounding curve. That
shaping stopped the oscillating and thus eliminating the drumming. And the
tension created in the metal by forming increased its strength and safety.
There is the example of grilles, too. The first GM grille that was more than a
winter shutter over the radiator appeared on the 16-cylinder Cadillacs of 1930.
Oakland, Pontiac’s predecessor, was next in the GM family to sport one. The
concept was to create a casing, thus providing design flexibility in place of
the utilitarian and unchanging look of a radiator core.
Then, in Indianapolis, racing car drivers found that if the core was boxed in 12
or 15 inches behind the front, air flow was increased and cooling considerably
improved as well. GM engineers began research on their own, and they learned
that the farther the core lay away from the grille, the smaller its opening
could be – reducing weight and cost, improving engineering efficiency. These
were unexpected outcomes indeed, from an idea that had only styling merit to
recommend it at the start.
“We try one good thing,” said one stylist, “and something else good comes out of
the other direction.”
Veteran designer Jules Andrade may have said it better: “All this is like a
chain. One link is the start for another, and it keeps growing longer and
better.”
It took time, of course. The first fastback (and the first enclosed running
boards) came in the “Knudsen Special” shown at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933.
But the first hint of a fastback in volume production was in 1935, when
Pontiac’s rear had lengthened out just enough to permit enclosure of the tire,
the first such enclosure in mass production. That hint – actually only a modest
flare at the time – did not actually grow up into a long, tapered rear end until
the 1940 GM models came along. The running boards, concealed on that same 1933
Fair model, did not go indoors on production cars until the end of the thirties,
and (a now amusing concession to tradition) the 1938 Cadillacs and LaSalles
offered them as optional.
It took trouble, too, as well as time. When the grilles first began to overhand
the wheels, they looked awkward, even to the designers who had conceived the
idea. Long, tedious periods of development were needed before cars stopped
seeming to be falling on their faces when brakes were applied and rear ends rose
upward on their springs. Some models saw grilles as much as 35 inches ahead of
the axle.
Sometimes a Keystone Comedy fall on the face actually happened – in the studio,
anyway. Working in the thirties after the Chicago Fair, Pontiac designers began
to project their model car grille farther and farther out. Each day they looked
at their work, pulled off the tinsel paper than simulated plating, and added
another layer of clay at the front. Division officials came in for a showing.
Then and there, as though the questioning, frowning looks were too much for it
bear, the lengthened front end gave up the ghost and fell ingloriously onto the
floor. The studio people swept up the disheveled mass of clay and started over
again.
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