Design: The Guru of Impossible Engineering Creates a Car

by John B. Carnett Architect Frank Gehry in a cardboard chair of his own design. Gehry is collaborating with a group of MIT students to make a new type of concept car. The colorful wood-block models behind him were built by one of the students. John B. Carnett

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Two years ago, Frank O. Gehry strapped himself into the driver´s seat of a V8 Dodge Dakota pickup with bald rear tires and drove onto a skid pad at the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in Monterey, California. It was a clear day, but the pad´s surface was wet, and within seconds he was sliding out of control-which was the point. Gehry-the world-renowned architect of the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles-had come to this Skip Barber Racing School along with a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn the tricks of the pros: skid recovery, heel-and-toe downshifting and the advanced braking techniques of Formula 1 drivers.


â€It was scary,†the 75-year-old architect says of the 110-octane weekend. But he wasn´t there for the adrenaline rush. He was there to research a new project: building an automobile. Gehry is collaborating with the MIT Media Lab to design a concept car unlike anything Detroit would produce by itself.


The idea is to leverage the Media Lab´s knowledge of advanced technologies and Gehry´s knack for building the impossible to produce a vehicle that challenges the conventional wisdom of how a car is designed and what it can do. General Motors, a Media Lab sponsor, has signed on to provide technical support. â€GM knows how to design automobiles, and it does that very well,†says William Mitchell of MIT, a professor at both the school of architecture and the Media Lab, in whose classroom the concept-car idea was concocted. â€But it´s hard to step out of the box. That was our mandate.â€

Ever since Harley Earl, GM´s first design chief, unveiled the company´s earliest concept cars-including the LeSabre of 1951, with its fully automatic convertible top-the industry has used show cars to hint at the future. But prophesies can be wrong. In hindsight, the bold vision of the 1956 Firebird II-a turbine-powered, titanium-skinned prototype engineered for the automated highways of tomorrow-showed a naive optimism. â€If you go too far out, you lose credibility,†admits Wayne K. Cherry, who recently retired as GM´s vice president of design but is on contract to see this project through. â€But if you don´t go far enough, then why bother?â€


Gehry frees walls the way Jackson Pollock freed
paint. His swirling, curvilinear forms pushed the technical boundaries of 20th-century architecture and forced steelworkers, roofers and others to reinvent their crafts. Seen from the surrounding hillside, the Guggenheim Bilbao unfurls in metallic waves; closer up, you can see the 0.38-
millimeter-thick sheets of titanium almost flutter. Some observers have called it the first building of the 21st century. More recently, Gehry has earned headlines for the steel-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall and for MIT´s Stata Center, with its tilted brick towers and crumpled metal.


An unconventional approach to materials has defined Gehry´s career, yet it has also earned him derision, especially in the early years, when he experimented with chain link and plywood. â€Being accepted isn´t everything,†he once
said. His reputation grew, and in 1989 he won the Pritzker Prize-the Nobel of architecture-though it was the 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao that brought him worldwide celebrity.