Awards

• Winner of British Book Design & Production Award: Photographic Books, Art / Architecture Monographs 2009
• Winner of British Book Design & Production Award: Photographic Books, Art / Architecture Monographs 2009.

Overview

Sources are eclectic, results mixed, but one thing is certain: car design is being forced up an ever tightening spiral of creativity. These machines are memorials of our tastes, yearnings and capabilities. They have layers of meaning and can as, Henry Ford knew, be read like a book if only you know how. This book tells that story in a series of case studies which reveal national characteristics: American flair, German technical suprematism, French vernacular chic, gorgeous Italian sculpture, English antiquarianism, Japanese ingenuity, Swedish responsibility. Cars featured appear in chronological date order from the 1908 Ford Model T to 2003 BMW 5 Series. The chosen cars will be specially photographed in a uniform style and reproduced in 4 colour black and white so as to distance this book from the cliches and conventions of specialist automotive publishing and to highlight form and shape. Each picture will be accompanied by a short critical essay including essential historical material together with colourful anecdotage and quotations as well as a persuasive aesthetic appraisal of each vehicle.

Full Product Details

9781840915044

Table of Contents

Reviews

Have you ever heard of a Lincoln Zephyr? Turn to page 42 of this luxurious book, and see for yourself the 1935 model of that extraordinarily styled automobile. Style is whatthis oversized beauty of a book (which is itself the epitome of style) is all about. Accomplished automotive writer Bayley begins his breathtaking album of stunningblack-and-white photographs with the bold statement: Car design is one of the distinctive, even defining, art forms of the twenty-first century. Further, he argues, car design is our age's singular contribution to cultural history. Each car [was] selected because it changed the conventional wisdom, lifted the game, raised the bar in terms of style... Check out, in particular, the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. Wow! American opulence at its most dramatic. Brad Hooper, Booklist

Author Information

Stephen Bayley is one of the world s best known commentators on design and popular culture. In 1989 he was made a Chevalier de L Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France s top artistic honour, by the French Minister of Culture. Since 1990 Bayley has been a design consultant working on imaginative communications projects for Ford, Jaguar, Fiat, Audi and BMW amongst others, and wrote the creative strategy for Mercedes-Benz advertisements. He has written for Car magazine for the past 25 years and was awarded PPA Columnist of the Year for his car column in GQ (which ran for about eight years). He has also written popular regular car columns for The Daily Telegraph and Management Today. He is also well-known as an outspoken commentator on art and design. Stephen's previous deisbn book, DESIGN, written in conjunction with Sir Terence Conran, has been hugely successful, selling over 30,000 copies worldwide.

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