A car designer drawing a luxury sports coupe needs an eye for a perfect curve, and at that price point, curvy sheet metal is in the budget. The designer has leeway that someone drawing a mass-market “family truckster” does not.
Still, the starting point will be a basic set of proportions that, if realized accurately, will go a long way toward a successful design—one that people will look at and say, “that looks right.” Those proportions are tied to basic mechanical underpinnings. A front-engine, rear-wheel-drive coupe will tend to have a long hood/bonnet, to accommodate a longitudinally-mounted engine. There will be little front overhang, as that engine will be mounted behind the front wheels for weight-centering. There will be little rear overhang, as giant boots/trunks aren’t necessary on such a car. The roof can slope down pretty close behind the front seat headrests, as the car either has no back seats or the back seats don’t matter. So you get a “fastback” look that always catches the eye. Trying to pull that off when the back seats do matter—when the brief calls for full adult headroom back there—is an advanced design trick. (Porsche pulled it off in the 2nd-gen. Panamera.)
The right proportions don’t need to be hidden by creases or add-ons. You don’t want to hide them.
When the ratio of bonnet/hood to cabin, of height to length, of width to length to height, and of “greenhouse” to body, are all dialed-in, the car is judged beautiful.
This is old. Way older than cars. I study early modern ship design. Shipwrights before the mid-nineteenth-century built largely “by eye.” Apprentices were trained by masters, then worked as journeymen, until they established themselves as masters in their own right. That required learning not just the techniques for fastening and structural reinforcement, materials selection and weight distribution. It required developing the “eye” for proportion in a shape composed almost entirely of curves. Shipbuilding treatises of the time emphasize long lists of ratios. Length to beam (breadth). Breadth to depth in hold. Height of mainmast to length. On and on. Every component of the ship is related to others by a ratio. Proportion existed independent of scale. And proper design and construction depended on realizing proper proportion.
In our era of “engineering,” with complex mathematical calculations performed by computers and CAD-generated diagrams and blueprints, this may seem not just abstract, but arcane. It is indeed ancient; early-modern “mechanics,” as they called them, worked with a conceptual legacy of the Greeks. Ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers and their heirs thought in terms of proper forms, of geometry, of proportion. They conceived of those things as the basic reality of the cosmos. It wasn’t until Kepler that European astronomers abandoned trying to understand the heavens in terms of interlocking geometric shapes—and he only abandoned it after years of frustrating attempts to make it work.
Kepler’s effort may have proved a dead end, but in fact, “nature” does work in proportions. It sometimes plays fast and loose with them, for specific reasons—as with the giraffe. But proportion, like pattern (think of the spiral gyration) is everywhere in the universe. It’s not some aesthetic concept existing independently of “function.” The two are inextricably related. That doesn’t mean “form follows function.” It means that much of what we say “looks right” looks right because it works. And with ships, and with cars, getting the proportions right makes it more likely that the ship, or car, will work.
Archaeologists and historians have expended much effort attempting to understand the principles behind the construction of real ships—ones whose remains we have found, intact enough to make sufficient measurements upon which to base a theory of design. The example with which I’m most familiar is what Warren Riess decided was the Princess Carolina, built in South Carolina in the early eighteenth century, and the oldest American-built merchant ship yet found. The ship had been used as fill at the New York City waterfront, and her remains were found while digging out the foundation for a skyscraper on Water Street.
Warren knew that the proportions of the ship did not match those prescribed in any of our extant treatises. For years, he puzzled over the design principle. Finally, he realized that he needed to adjust his measurements for the distortion caused by more than two centuries underground. When he figured out how to do that correctly, the guiding proportion finally revealed itself. The shipwright had used a simple set of proportions based on the ship’s maximum breadth, twenty-four feet. All the major dimensions were either fractions or multiples of twenty-four. Inscribed circles of a fraction of twenty-four exactly matched the defining curves. This would have struck Pythagoras as proper.
Evidence strongly suggests that Princess Carolina had a long career sailing the North Atlantic. Clearly, her proportions “worked.”
There is one other important aesthetic aspect of pleasing design that’s related to what a ship, or a car, does: flowing curves. We don’t like abrupt transitions in the lines of either. We like smooth, gradual, graceful transitions in curves. Not coincidentally, so do air and water. While they certainly did not fully-understand the devilishly-complex physics of air- and water-flow (we still debate aspects of it), they—shipwrights and pre-wind-tunnel car designers—understood the gist of the benefit of smooth flow. Smooth curves encourage smooth flow.
The relationship between a visually-pleasing design and the intended function of the vehicle is not, of course a perfect correspondence. The c.-2015 Chevy Camaro looks cool but, according to someone close to me who refused to drive one, “you can’t see out of the damn thing.” The “greenhouse” is, indeed, rather squat—which looks really cool on a concept car, but isn’t great for visibility on the road.
Our sense of proper proportion can also change over time. Over the past thirty years, crash safety regulations have required manufacturers to raise beltlines and build roof structures that can support the weight of the upside-down vehicle. This has decreased greenhouse height, relative to the rest of the car. (It has also cut into visibility by introducing wider pillars.) I’ve noticed that now, when I see pictures of Jaguar XJ sedans/saloons from the 1990s, their greenhouses look a bit “too high.” Visually, I slightly prefer the later generations. At the time, though, this would not have occurred to me. To say that “tastes change” is a truism; here is an example of taste changing as functional considerations alter the aesthetics of a design over an extended period of time.
David Pye argued eloquently against another truism—“form follows function”—in the 1960s. He was attacking technological determinism, which historians of technology now more or less firmly reject. That doesn’t mean, though, that there is no relationship between form and function. It means that form does not dictate function—not by itself, anyway. It means that our sense of form, our “taste” or sense of what “looks right,” influences design—sometimes more than “function” does. Given that there is almost always more than one design that will accomplish the brief for a particular set of functions, there is almost always latitude for aesthetic preferences to strongly influence, if not determine, the choice.
Warren Riess with Sheli O. Smith, The Ship That Held Up Wall Street (College Station: TAMU Press, 2015).
David Pye, The Nature of Design (New York: Sterling, 1964).
Warren Riess with Sheli O. Smith, The Ship That Held Up Wall Street (College Station: TAMU Press, 2015).
David Pye, The Nature of Design (New York: Sterling, 1964).