Architecture and the car: as the automobile evolved in tandem with modern architecture, it created myths, legends and new building types

Architectural Review, The, June, 2005 by Jonathan Glancey

Le Corbusier, meanwhile, was helping Voison to design bodies for his striking, lightweight cars, although there is, sadly, no clear proof (to date) of which particular models the architect gave shape to. And yet, for all the effort that Le Corbusier put into the shapes of Voisons, and Walter Gropius invested in a couple of contemporary Adlers, the early automobile itself was a rather clumsy machine. Despite the revolutionary work of Kahn in Detroit, they lacked the elan of the Villa Savoye and the futuristic ingenuity of the Lingotto plant. As Sergio Pininfarina, the great Italian car stylist, once said, 'In a certain sense, it [the car] was born old, let us say baroque or gothic'. As indeed it was, a thing of automotive industry flying buttresses, domes and fanciful decorative effects. It was not really until after the Second World War, and notably in the Pininfarina design of the lightweight Cisitalia coupe (1946), that we can recognise the all-of-a-piece form of the modern car.

For Le Corbusier, the design of the car might have been key to the design of contemporary, and future, houses; yet, in reality, his devotion to the car was more symbolic than practical. Kahn's was the real mass religion: the reality of automobile production working, piston-in-cylinder, with the automotive industry. Even so, there was an undoubtedly close connection between early Modern Movement architecture and the car. If the London Georgian terrace of the eighteenth century, for example, had been designed, unwittingly, as a kind of mirror image of the well-groomed contemporary pedestrian, and the elongated white stucco Regency terraces of John Nash around Regent's Park designed to reflect the stately, if faster, movement of horse-drawn traffic, determinedly horizontal white Modern Movement architecture surely reflected the speed of the passing car. So much so, that after the Second World War, whole towns and cities, from Los Angeles to Milton Keynes via Brasilia, were designed, and re-designed, to cope with and reflect the high-speed machinations of the automobile. In a purely abstract sense, this phenomenon advanced the curious beauty of the clover-leaf US freeway junction, concrete flyovers, spiral garage ramps and buildings that looked as if they were made for the car rather than for human beings.

Of course many architects were excited by the car; and by how cities could be animated in a way that had never been seen. Now, of course, architects everywhere talk of curbing the car, although some of the best of them continue to design, very successfully, for it. In this issue of AR, we see radical designs by Zaha Hadid for BMW (p50) and UN Studio for Mercedes (p74).

However, whether we like it or not, it was never really architects, like Le Corbusier, who trumpeted the design of the car, who connected it convincingly to architecture, but rather it was Albert Kahn, perhaps the most prolific architect of all time, the Model-T of the Mistress Art.