Design: The Guru of Impossible Engineering Creates a Car

Gehry, who has designed watches, chairs, even a line of doorknobs, says this challenge holds particular appeal. â€When you think about it,†he muses, â€the car represents so much about American society. It´s got social issues. It´s got style. It´s got symbolism. So it´s fascinating from that standpoint.â€

For GM, the project provides a rare opportunity. Bottom-line pressures have forced the Big Three to cut costs by streamlining the manufacturing process. A few years ago, GM had 40 kinds of door handles in its parts bin; today it has five. The company is also building cars as different as the Corvette C6 and the Cadillac XLR on the same basic architecture, leaving less leeway for radical design or engineering innovations.


Moreover, the company´s concept cars-with the exception of the breakthrough Autonomy and its second iteration, the Hy-wire-are now closely aligned with its production vehicles. â€Concept cars have become strategic messages that aren´t about getting the public to dream,†says Geoff Wardle, the acting chair of transportation design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. â€They are more of a test bed to see how a design direction or new technology will be perceived.â€

The Gehry creation will be another sort
of concept car. It is unlikely to turn into a new line of production vehicles, but the exercise may inspire some dreaming. â€The car industry needs so much help in extracting itself from its view of how a car should be designed,†Wardle says. â€Just the fact that Gehry is doing this will stir people up and get them thinking.â€

Gehry is more circumspect. â€It´s not likely that a creature from another culture is going to come in and come up with anything new,†he says. â€The only thing that´s possible is that you bring to it a new way of looking at something. You ask stupid questions, and that might trigger ideas.â€


Seated in his spacious corner office on the fourth
floor of the MIT Media Lab, William Mitchell is discussing triangular wheels. It´s an inauspicious, if not absurd, starting point, but his students still produced several solutions-including an equilateral triangle with arced sides and a central gear that ensures that the axle remains the same distance from the ground. â€We didn´t spend much time on that, though,†Mitchell says. â€We had more important things to get to.â€

That was last September, three years after one of Mitchell´s Ph.D. students, Ryan Chin, proposed that the Media Lab build a concept car. Mitchell ultimately convinced Gehry, an old friend and occasional co-teacher at MIT´s architecture school, to sign on. GM, already a Media Lab sponsor, agreed to provide engineering support and to build the vehicle. Mitchell´s goal was to have his students finish basic R&D in a year, leaving another year for Gehry to create his design.