Ferrari calls the competition the "New Concepts of the Myth.” Alcoa (they supply the aluminum for Ferrari's aluminum space frames) calls it "a showcase for the use of aluminum in a gran turismo car.” And you can be sure nobody in the competition calls it homework.
'Rosa Corsa,' designed by American James Hill, is a finalist in Ferrari's "New Concepts of Myth" competition. Hill is a student at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.
'Millechili,' one of four designs to win the "Ferrari: New Concepts of the Myth" award, looks plenty fast. Its creators, Spain's Luis Agullo Spottorno and Germany's Felix Hiller, are both students at the Istituto Eurepeo di Design (IED) in Turin, Italy.
'Testarossa Next Generation,' designed by IED studets Haim Levy (Israel), Andrea Spaggiari and Luca Trifone (both from Italy).
At first, it's jarring to see all the concept cars displayed together at Ferrari's exhibition of the finalists (which opened Tuesday, April 4, in New York). As fans, we're comfortable looking inside Ferrari's all-star pantheon: The Enzo - a monstrosity, yes, but it's family – rubs shoulders with the F50. The pugnacious Testarossa and the subtle Dino punctuates a Ferrari-red line that stretches back to the sublime, the quintessential, the damn-near aesthetically and mechanically perfect 250 GTO. Yet here, crammed inside Ferrari's Park Avenue showroom, are 20 new, wild and daring sculptures. Some are retro, almost art deco in form, with broad-shouldered curves and imposing fascia; others are pure fantasy, paying no heed to the imaginable limits of aerodynamic design. But somehow they're familiar – call them variations on the theme of Enzo. In their own, sometimes subtle ways, they are all Ferraris.
I'm sure the connection is much easier to grasp for the designers – when I first received the invitation to the opening, I thought this was nothing short of a design dream project, the culmination of years of steady daydreaming and furious doodling - it's not like you go into automotive design because you were so moved by a Ford Taurus (no offense to Mr. Taurus). But according to Bryon Fitzpatrick, the Chair of Transportation Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, it wasn't so easy: Another design school had dropped out of the gig late in the game, giving Fitzpatrick's class a shot, but with the impossible time frame of only six weeks to move from sketches to concepts. "We were boxing the models up with the paint still wet,” he says.
His student, Shigenori Maeda, presents a more placid description of the creative process. "Usually projects are very stressful,” says Maeda, who won the Alcoa Award (for the design that best embodies the essence of aluminum - or something like that). "This project I one-hundred percent enjoyed.”
Alcoa Award winner Shigenori Maeda and his 612 Lafayette
Maeda calls his concept the 612 Lafayette (a rear-mid-12 named after his Detroit home street). It is an homage to a familiar icon from his childhood in boom-time Japan: The Ferrari Testarossa. The concept's heritage is immediately obvious from its bold side-cowlings, but Maeda's design is clearly more than just an update: The model has none of the hard chines of the original, none of the boxy right angles. It looks less as though it was assembled and more as if it was milled out of a single billet of aluminum (which probably didn't hurt with the Alcoa folks). "The old Testarossa was front, side, rear,” Maeda says. "This is a more flowing design, with a little Asian influence.” Now he's on to something - a Ferrari that starts!
Maeda says he would like to continue to design sports cars when he graduates from design school next month ("I like making things that are extreme,” he tells me, "like the Ford Firebird – it looked like a rocket!”). But when I ask him if his dream company is Ferrari, he refuses to play favorites. "I'm still a student, I have many things to learn,” he says. "Right now, I'd like to work at any company that offers me a job." Of course, it can't hurt to be able to walk into an interview and say "My last job? Designing the next, next Ferrari."
“New Concepts of the Myth” is open to the public M-F from 10am-7pm, Saturday 11am-5pm, through April 22nd (closed April 14th, 15th). 410 Park Avenue (at 55th).
