High Beams: Simple Wood Toys, but So Much More December 15, 2006
Wooden toy cars that are a geometric nursery rhyme. IT’S not the old toy tin car or the plastic model assembled with glue. This toy, the Playsam Streamliner, is a five-inch painted wooden car that has become as powerful a symbol of Swedish design as a Volvo or an Ant chair. The design of the Streamliner is basic, a geometric nursery rhyme of a body and wheels and nothing more. It has been designated an official Swedish design classic by the Swedish National Museum and Swedish Design Council. Now, the Fitzsu Society, a shop in Los Angeles dedicated to …
Design: Cars So Green They’re Just a Dream December 2, 2006
Automakers’ West Coast studios are competing to design the best green-car fantasies at the third annual Design Challenge. HOBOS wandering the back roads used to sing about an imaginary place called the Big Rock Candy Mountain, “a land of lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,” where “there’s a lake of stew and of whiskey, too; you can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe.” Designers on the road to the future dream of similar technological pie in the sky in this year’s rendition of the Design Challenge, a shoot-out of car concepts submitted by local satellite design studios …
Handlebars: Ducati’s GT Brings Back a Saucy Spirit of the ’70s
Leading-edge mechanical bits on the new Ducati GT1000 are smoothly integrated with styling from an era when motorcycles focused more on function and less on image-preening. RETRO, all too often, is a concept that works in the showroom but not on the road. Styling that oozes nostalgia and yanks at the heartstrings too often proves impossibly impractical - ideal in memory but flawed in everyday service. Then there are the revivals of classic forms that really work - tributes to the soundness of their original concepts - reminding us that newer isn’t always better. Consider the Ducati GT1000. As a …
First Glance: When German Chefs Cook Italian December 1, 2006
Who says the world doesn’t need another six-figure midengine German-made sports car? Introduced on Wednesday: Audi R8 Is it real? Born as a racecar and reincarnated as a design study, the R8 is now ready for production. Hardly a secret, an R8 was on display on Park Avenue in Manhattan for two weeks in October, but its official North American debut was in Los Angeles. What’s the point? Lamborghini is in the same corporate family as Audi, so why not use many of the same ingredients to cook up a German Gallardo? The …