Into the Archive - Cars at the Design Museum: Cathedrals of the Twentieth Century

Here’s a little-known fact about the Design Museum. It was the first organisation to show a car at the V&A.

There’s a great backstory too. It happened in 1982, when the museum operated as the Boilerhouse Project at the V&A. Director Stephen Bayley was putting together an exhibition about the process of designing the new Ford Sierra, but he had a problem; the cars wouldn’t fit through the front doors. The other option was to manoeuvre cars through the V&A’s Sculpture and Metalwork galleries, but Bayley was frustrated by the internal bureaucracy needed to make this happen. “To get the cars into the link corridor requires only the unlocking of a door, but also the cooperation of two Museum Depts” he wrote to the V&A’s director, Sir Roy Strong. “What should have taken 10 minutes”, he complained, “has taken, so far, four working days and yet nothing has been achieved”.

In the end, Bayley went to Ford for help. With considerable resources at their disposal, the car company removed the roof of the Boilerhouse gallery so that the cars could be winched in by crane. The scale of the operation was such that Exhibition Road was temporarily closed to through traffic, but Ford managed to get all the cars in so that the exhibition could open on time. As Bayley later remarked, “to get cars in through the roof was a major exercise in civil engineering involving no Departments and was carried out effortlessly in less than five hours”.

It’s difficult to believe today, but at its launch the Ford Sierra was seen to be ahead of its time. The grainy photographs of the show look fascinating, and it’s clear that the intention was to emphasise the car as a completely re-thought designed object – including displays such as full-side cardboard mock-ups and clay models, to cut-aways and detailed insights from the design team. In a nice touch, cars were mounted onto scaffolding poles so that viewers could see underneath.

It’s nearly forty years since the Ford Sierra was craned into the Boilerhouse Project’s gallery, so we thought we’d celebrate by looking back at some of the amazing cars that have been displayed at the Design Museum over the years.

1985 saw the second car exhibition to be shown at the museum, a critique of the car by the eminent German graphic designer Otl Aicher. The show was advertised as ‘the problems of defending the automobile against its worshippers’ and it does sound as if the show took a rather provocative position – Aicher’s argument was that designers were too fixated on the styling and appearance of cars when they should be focussing on efficiency instead.

When the Design Museum opened at Shad Thames, they learnt their lessons from the Boilerhouse Project. A state-of-the-art car lift was installed on the outside of the building for the sole purpose of being able to show cars in the galleries. One of the earliest exhibits included a life-size wooden model of Le Corbusier’s Voiture Minimum, designed in 1936. Even though it never entered production, it predicted much of what would become standard in car design.

A few years later, the museum held an exhibition on Alfa Romeo, the iconic Italian car manufacturer. It included many well-known models, including the 1967 Tipo 33 Stradale.

These surprising cars were designed for a 1993 exhibition celebrating the legendary Fiat 500. For the show, the museum commissioned eight Italian design houses to create concept models of the new Cinquecento. Pictured here is the Z-Eco, a concept commuter car designed by the venerable Italian coachbuilder Zagato, with the idea that the car could be parked at the edge of a city and the electric bike used for further journeys. When returned to the car, the bike would be automatically recharged.

In 1998, the Design Museum was the first to stage an exhibition on the Porsche family and their remarkable contribution to automotive design. The exhibition featured thirteen iconic cars, including the 1958 Porsche Spyder (pictured left), the Porsche 911, the Boxster and the Volkswagen Beetle.

Of course, the Design Museum couldn’t go for long without paying tribute to the Mini. 1999 saw the fortieth anniversary of the small car, which included re-painted versions by Kate Moss, David Bowie and Paul Smith. Smith’s distinctive stripy car was seen again for the record-breaking ‘Hello My Name is Paul Smith’ exhibition in 2013.

2001 saw the launch of the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish at the Design Museum. It was a particularly nerve-wracking installation; the car had to be craned up to the gallery while still in its shipping container so that it could be carefully rolled into position.

The following year saw two iconic Citroën cars: the 2CV and the 1955 Citroën DS. The DS was a phenomenon on its launch. French theorist Roland Barthes (not normally one for superlatives) was so taken with the DS that he likened cars to ‘cathedrals’ – impressive structures made by anonymous artisans, but which still embody a magical allure for the population as a whole.

A few years later, one of the most popular racing sports in the world came to the Design Museum. Formula One: The Great Design Race featured several iconic cars exploring the design innovations at the heart of F1. The star of the show was an exploded version of Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning car, the Renault R25.

In the same year, an exhibition on visionary German designer Luigi Colani saw a number of cars appear in the galleries including this concept for a miniature car. Nicknamed the ‘yellow egg’, this was a striking vision of what electric cars could look like.

While on the theme of electric cars, when designer Tom Dixon was asked what he would do to make London a better place he proposed installing ecologically friendly technology into outdated machines. To make his point, he installed the electric engine of a milk float into a handsome 1949 Bentley. When it was pointed out that the car would have a top speed of only five miles an hour, Dixon’s reply was that London traffic rarely exceeded this speed anyway.

The Designs of the Year awards have long featured eye-catching cars. One of the more memorable exhibits was this concept BMW GINA Light Visionary Model Car from 2010, featuring a unique fabric body that changed shape according to conditions and speeds.

In 2011, the Design Museum celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of the finest cars the world has ever seen – the Jaguar E-Type, designed by Malcolm Sayer. The car on display in the riverside Tank was one of the few surviving original press cars from 1961, with the chassis no. 94.

Later that year, the Mini made another appearance in This is Design, but with one small difference – the model on show was cut in half, lengthwise, to emphasise just how small the iconic car actually was.

In 2015, Google’s Waymo self-driving car was announced as the winner of the Transport category in the Design Museum’s Design of the Year exhibition in 2015. It re-appeared a few years later in 2017’s ‘California: Designing Freedom’, alongside a motorbike from the film ‘Easy Rider’ – one of the most pleasing juxtapositions ever seen at the museum.

The Ferrari show, shown later in 2017, featured too many stunning models to list here. One of the more special exhibits was a half-and-half model of a Ferrari J50, which showed how Ferrari bodywork is still carefully sculpted from clay.

That year also saw a proud moment when the Design Museum was chosen for the launch of the fourth member of the Range Rover Family, the Range Rover Velar. After being unveiled during a spectacular world-premiere event, the car then went on public display.

And finally, one of most recent cars to be shown in the Design Museum was the unforgettable Probe 16, designed by brothers Dennis and Peter Adams. It was filmed in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and was one of the stars of the show for the museum’s record-breaking Kubrick exhibition in 2019.

So what cars will we see in future? Only time will tell. However, it’s clear that there are many challenges and opportunities ahead for the car industry: from autonomous vehicles to new manufacturing techniques, from electric cars to new urban landscapes. The Design Museum’s ambition is to be a place where these changes can be discussed in public; and recent events have borne this out – such as Jaguar: An Interactive Exploration of Designing an Electric Car for the Jaguar I-PACE, and Defender: Replacing an Icon for the new Land Rover Defender, launched in early 2020.

Looking back, it is clear that the car is one of the defining objects of the modern age. To paraphrase Barthes, the twentieth century left behind some magnificent cathedrals.