An Essay for my 14 Year Old

PORSCHE

By Adrian Schachter


Ferdinand Porsche in 1931, an Austrian engineer, started the company PORSCHE. He was working in the automotive industry in Germany and helped to create the first Volkswagen, the Beetle, which has sold millions and millions (Hitler actually stole the design from Josef Ganz when he discovered he was Jewish and handed over the brief to Porsche, though Ferdinand Porsche and his son only got to fully enjoy their success after they were released from internment for war crimes, which facts I happened to leave out of the school version). After World War II the Porsche Company began as an independent company with a rear-engined sports car called the 356, and the legend as we know it today was successfully launched. By fostering a program of development for motor racing, which Porsche came to dominate in many sectors, the road cars directly benefited from the advancements. The saying goes, race them on the Sundays, sell them on Mondays.


The Porsche 911 is a luxury 2-door sports coupe introduced in 1963 and designed by the son of the company founder; since then it has undergone continuous development over the years, but the basic concept has remained little changed throughout its evolution over nearly 50 years. The classic Porsche 911 was developed as a much more powerful, larger, more comfortable replacement for the company's first model, the 356. Originally the car was to be known as the 901 but the company Peugeot filed to own the rights to any car designated by a number with a zero in the middle! After i eat a big meal I sort of resemble a snake that ate a mouse which pretty much is the shape of a Porsche 911; maybe that's why i respond so much.


What makes the 911 and Porsche Company so great is that they have enjoyed a degree of reliability and excellence in engineering unrivaled by any company in the history of car making. The company is driven by engineering rather than flashy design or other tricks to make it fashionable and desirable employed by other carmakers. The consistency in design is I feel not a drawback to the company over the years, though some people might argue that the company has not really strayed too far over the many years making nearly what appears to be the same car over and over again. But this is not so as there have been subtle refinements over time reflecting technological developments from style and engine changes to new environmentally sound hybrids.


Personally, I love these cars (my dad has a few classic old ones from the 1970’s so I have seen, been driven in and smelled them a lot!), because they are cleanly designed, simple and elegant, and are incredibly well made. The colors of the early cars are wild and adventurous, like signal yellow, tangerine and viper green which you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the brand, but they speak of the time and they are like big art pieces. Though Ferrari’s are louder, way more attention grabbing, and say more about how much money you have then how you like to drive, a Porsche is more about your relationship to the road and experience behind the wheel. Also, even the old cars, if well maintained, will never fail to start with a twist of the key! (Funny, the day this was handed in to teacher my 1969 911E, just off boat from US, conked out leaving a gas station followed by a 1963 shiny red Ferrari Dino driven by a French woman-that was embarrassing. Also, first time in 15 years a Porsche failed to function; perhaps payback for assisting son shirk homework).


This reason the company is so successful, at times the most financially successful car company on the planet, is precisely because of the consistency of the product, the continuity of the design and excellence of engineering. Rather then stressing newness just for the sake of satisfying some marketing campaign, as people always seem to want the next thing, Porsche continues to innovate and invent but within a solid framework of delivering great reliable and desirable to own cars!! And unlike most companies and consumers, Porsche thinks that less is more (light weight and simplicity), instead of more is more.


Adrian: Amazing, this is a top piece of work. You clearly have an interest into Porsche. You should consider a career as a motoring journalist! Grade A

new world order. (excerpt)

The west is the new emerging market. Specifically, Italy is on the verge of IMF intervention, and on the brink or just past is: Greece, USA, UK, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France, and I’m sure I am missing a few. Why today a day cannot go by without lip service to so-called emerging markets? Sorry, but Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Russia, they are far from emerging, they have emerged; in fact they are dictating the flow of commerce. Driving commodities, property, gold, art, wine; you name it—that is more late capitalism then developing country. And we who think we are above the fray, above reproach, above it all, are not far from being reduced to hat-in-hand has-beens. A bit of cold, a bit of snow: Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport paralyzed for a week during Christmas; and, Kennedy Airport in New York, pretty much the same deal. But in a truly contrarian sense, give us 10 years or so to retrench, with technology leading the way, and perhaps we can return to the fray.

"The most groundbreaking art is coming from the East" Saatchi Gallery Debate for Asian art in London 11/11/10

I hate to start off on such a negative note but it’s is an absurd, jingoistic and presumptuous sentiment to even ask the question as to whether Asian or European art is more or less groundbreaking than art from any other place on the planet. Funny how American art doesn’t even rate a mention in the premise to this discussion. I once read a Jay Jopling quote some years ago that the only good art was being created in London (yet the rest England); it was as inane and meaningless a comment then about art from East London as it is about art from the East tonight.


I am admittedly not an expert on Asian art and certainly do not profess to be one, I only know what little I have seen in the galleries, books, magazines and auction houses. And with a population of over a billion in China, it would be rather surprising if there wasn’t at least some great art to emerge in the recent past. However, like George Washington, I am incapable of telling a lie: embarrassingly, I haven’t even been to the region yet, just another sheltered American living in London. But, with a grain of salt and without meaning to be flippant, what’s so groundbreaking in the sense of a true paradigm shift, about paintings made with ashes, depictions of family bloodlines, groups of smiley faces, baby Mao’s, Porsche and Pepsi signs and stacks of vases and chairs?


My point is that Asian art is no more or less exciting today then art from New Jersey, New Dehli or New Zeland. We live in a new, interdependent world order after years of lip service to globalization where artistic contributions with weight and quality arise from anywhere and everywhere. Such foolish, gratuitous and sweeping generalizations before us tonight are more marketing hype then meaningful. I’d say they are dangerous too, but in the context of the art world there is very little prospect of danger, other than being Ai Wei Wei or crushed by a toppling Richard Serra sculpture or whacked by a Christo umbrella.


If you phrased it in a wider sense, perhaps art from the emerging markets, including India, Russia, the Middle East but also you can’t count out South America, Africa … the world, it just doesn’t make sense any way you slice it. Great art emerges from all corners of the earth and the premise of this entire debate is rather superfluous altogether. Besides, not to be too cynical either, a lot of the art from the East seems calculated to titillate and feed into the voracious appetites and expectations of western collectors, a kind of reverse stereotyping where the art is an effort to give the buyer what they think Chinese art should be like for instance. In any event, the world is so homogenous with everyone watching the same crap on TV, same commercial movies, reading the same monotonous art magazines and web sites that often you would be hard pressed to differentiate art from one region of the world to the next.

Back to Ai Wei Wei, this truly is one of the only differentiating factors comparing art from one country to the next as there are very few places besides Russia where you put your life on the line just to express yourself; and, an artist can find themselves on the front page of the international newspapers and fundamentally threatened, thwarted and physically endangered just or picking up a paint brush or making an installation. Thus anxieties about loss of identity and cultural specificity are truly not the same in the West but they are also just as at stake in places as disparate as Cuba and the Middle East and any other regime where democracy is not fully tolerated or embraced as an option.

As far as the references to differing tastes, aspirations, and categories of consciousness, we are mostly all sadly striving for the same Prada defined spoils of mass consumerism. So yet again, I simply find many more similarities in the world today then differences. Thank you very much.

The Royal College of Art, 11/9/10 Design Relationships: The ways design relates to commerce and the ways it touches people

I don't differentiate between a chair, a sculpture or a car. As Sam has said to me in the past, cars are the most ubiquitous form of design in our lives, experienced on a daily basis literally thousands of times. Yet we don't see them while driving and leave them after parking. Though I must admit I keep mine in my office, with one half under my desk. 

Now I’d like to speak about what is called Design Art. This is a rather artificial term recently coined by an auction house to market high- end furniture like art. Design Art aped the art market releasing objects in limited editions, usually of 12 for no rhyme or reason, and in the process raised the bar of what you can get away with charging for a chair. This originated with the practice of casting bronze sculptures in more than one due to process of creating moulds from which to cast objects. And it worked: spawning countless design auctions, galleries and fairs, among the most prominent is the fair associated with Basel, the main event in Switzerland and the coming version in Miami next month.


Though design art may seem a gimmick to ascribe higher value to what is in effect simply another chair or a sofa, the key issue, which I feel can have dramatic implications for the car industry is that it does permit designers a wider platform to experiment with less commercially viable materials and technologies that could not readily be put into production.


Marc Newson, the poster boy for design art, has designed a widely acclaimed prototype for Ford and most famously the Lockheed Lounge, inspired by the riveted wings of a plane, which has been featured in a Madonna video and has fetched more that $2.5m in a private sale. Newson’s Locheed was fabricated in an addition of 8 with 4 proofs-if you add that up in total, you can afford a Lockheed plane with the proceeds of the edition, Conran’s should take note. More recently Newson has done a boat for Riva, a plane interior for Quantas and an actual spaceship, and regularly exhibits for the worlds most prestigious gallery-Gagosian, where in New York (Gagosian has about 500 galleries but that’s another talk) he presently has an exhibit solely based on the theme of transportation.


My point is that why shouldn't cars premier at museums and galleries and be marketed like works of art-like limited edition sculptures? I've been successful in convincing Phillips auction house most known for flogging Koons, to sell cars in their design sales (by the way, last night they sold a Warhol for nearly $63.5m in a $137m contemporary art sale, dwarfing last year’s $7m auction).


In 2006 I commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to design the Z Car concept, of which we have now done two iterations, a 3 and 4 wheel prototype. Zaha has created many transport relevant designs from a parking lot in France, a firehouse in Basel, the BMW factory in Leipzig, a new boat as well, and is nearing completion on the extraordinary Olympic swimming pavilion—a 17,000 seat arena. In an amazing act of democratizing the factory, the conveyor belt for BMW, where the 3 series is built, travels overhead though the cafeteria and executive offices.


The Z Car, of which we have a few 1:1 scale models, has traveled from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to Museums and galleries throughout Europe, the States and the Middle East. Major manufactures could learn something from such a bespoke design led approach. It takes the same money to design an awful car as an awfully nice one. And I'd visit any museum in the world to see a Frank Stephenson exhibit and be happy to collect his and other designer’s drawings. Sadly and undeservedly, car designers are the unsung heroes of aesthetics. But on a more practical level, why not use existing platforms like having Hadid re-skin a T25 Gordon Murray city car for the Olympics?


Though I am a bit extreme in my appreciation of all things cars, even as static objects, the public is being sold short by the degree of mediocrity in the world of vehicle design. Today, design seems so homogenous the world over, but its much worse in the states where driving down the motorway seems like a continuous block of metal—like soviet block architecture on wheels which is endlessly depressing. We live in a universe defined by an unprecedented degree of choice, so why not when it comes to cars too?