[email protected] wrote:
(re-arranged to bottom post)
|| Richard Brookman wrote:
||| Austin Shackles wrote:
|||
|||||| It actually looks a bit like the PT Cruiser, which says a lot.
|||||
||||| actually, I think the PTC looks quite good, in black, and with
||||| some extra chrome. Looks like an updated gangster car from the
||||| 30s.
|||
||| The whole point, IMO. It looks like one thing, but it most
||| definitely is something else. It's all "let's pretend". The
||| reason we all like Land Rovers is that they tend to be what they
||| seem to be, and aren't styled into looking like something else.
||| Well, up to the newest RR, anyway. <ducks>
|| To suggest that an item is ugly because it looks like another item is
|| nonsense. It's like saying a blue car is ugly because the sky is
|| blue. The assumption is that the sky is ugly, therefore the car is
|| ugly. That's nonsense.
Agreed, but that is not what I was saying. It is a bland family saloon with
a moderately feeble engine dressed up to look like a 1930s hot-rod. That
puts it in the same category as the rusty Corsa with the expensive bodykit -
something which the owner is trying to pretend is something else, or that
he/she hopes other people will think is something else. In either case, it
offends me because it isn't honest. Engineering is honest, styling is
essentially dishonest. Engineering builds something that works (the old
hot-rods looked that way for sound dynamic reasons), styling tries to hide
the engineering and impose something else on it. Usually, the something
else is there to pander to the owner's ego rather than enhance the machine
in terms of its function.
It's the whole form and function debate, and I tend to appreciate honest
function and distrust any form which disguises that.
|| If you took the PT Cruiser out of the context of the 1930s retro
|| ideal, we'd probably all say it was a nice looking car. How do we
|| know this? Because when they came out in the 30s there was no
|| history to compare them to yet. People weren't saying I like them
|| or don't like them because they look like a model T. The design was
|| new and people loved them for what they were.
Agreed.
|| They are nice looking cars for the same reason they were nice looking
|| cars in the 30s:
|| The wheel wells express the nature of the car... wheeled
|| transportation.
OK ...
|| The strong hood line is an aerodynamic hyperbola
|| The belt line continue all the way around the car and ties it all
|| together
This is aesthetics and has nothing to do with the machine itself. Where we
seem to disagree is whether this matters or not.
|| The large grill expresses the nature of the engine's need for air
Rather than having a large grille because the engine actually needs the air.
|| The forward rake of the roof line suggests agressive forward momentum
This is where I stick. The stylist says the roof line "suggests aggressive
forward momentum". The car is actually an ordinary saloon mainly used for
the Tesco trip. The difference between the two is where the owner's ego
lives. To go back to the Actyon: the "consummate urban warrior" exists in
the stylist's mind, the marketeer's wordcraft and the purchaser's fantasies.
Not in the metal, which is probably pretty crap.
|| The Land Rover is simple function. It is functional and it expresses
|| that function with no compromise for aesthetics. It also happens to
|| be ugly, but that's OK, it's not supposed to be beautiful. IMHO
Beauty and ugliness are entirely subjective - I find the lines of a classic
Land Rover beautiful, but that's just me. A "styled" body on a junk car is,
to me, like sportswear on a fat smoker. "Look at me, I'm fit, I wear
Adidas!"
--
Rich
==============================
I don't approve of signatures, so I don't have one.
Form/function - a bugbear of mine.
