Design - Freeman Thomas

Talking about specific cars with Freeman Thomas gives you an appreciation for how impoverished design has become, as well as a sense of the values that an innovative designer brings to the table.

Thomas is out in the Detroit suburbs on this particular afternoon to attend an annual car event: the Woodward Dream Cruise. The Cruise is a weekend event that draws roughly 2 million spectators. Thousands of vintage-car owners in Detroit get their cars out of their garages and cruise down Woodward Avenue -- one of Detroit's main boulevards -- into the city, showing off their wheels and ogling everyone else's. On this one strip, every era of America's infatuation with automobiles is represented.

Thomas has come to the Catholic church as a rendezvous and a place to park his borrowed Prowler. Before he heads over to Woodward Avenue, he gives a brief lesson in design while standing in the parking lot of the church.

"The Prowler makes you smile," he says. "Why? Because it's focused. It has a plot, a reason for being, a passion. It evokes the hot rod. It evokes the American Dream. This car is the human psyche."

He turns to an older green Chevy pickup parked nearby. The truck is all straight lines and smooth sides. It's uninflected, with the utilitarian style of a washing machine. "It's a bland architecture," says Thomas, referring to the Chevy. "It's very practical. What is its story? It's very left brain. You buy it because you need it."

Not four spaces away is a new Dodge Ram pickup. Its nose is high, its hood cocky, its fenders bulging over its rear wheel wells. And it's red.

"This car is more true to what a truck is," says Thomas. "It has a fender and a hood like a big truck. That's the passion. A truck. The fenders have shape, they invite you to touch the truck. The Dodge Ram is like Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Fallingwater house: It expresses its environment. The beds of these two pickups are the same. They're both designed to hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood. It costs exactly the same to give the metal sides on the outside of the truck some shape as it does to leave them flat. If you get up to wash your truck on Saturday morning, of these two trucks, washing the Chevy is going to be a chore, and washing the Ram is going to be a pleasure."

Thomas walks over to a Buick Century. "This isn't that much different from the Taurus or the Camry," he says. "This is what I call 'committee design.' These cars are reliable. But they are not a forum for honesty. They are really just different sizes of the same car -- the same shape, the same architecture."

The silhouette of a car is what first captures Thomas's eye -- both when he's looking and when he's drawing. A car reveals its personality through its silhouette: the stance, the position of the wheels, where people sit, the curve of the roofline, the balance between the windows and the body. "You can instantly tell the era of a car by its silhouette," says Thomas.

The New Beetle, in profile, has three arches: the roof and the front and back fenders. Why does that particular combination of shapes evoke good humor, friendliness? Thomas takes a pen out of his pocket and points to a tiny logo on its clip: It's the ears and head of Mickey Mouse. He hasn't answered the "why" question -- only pointed out that the arch shapes you see when you look at the Beetle have the same appeal in other contexts. The Audi TT silhouette has oversize wheels dramatically positioned at the far reaches of the body. It's a car that will grab the road and not let go. The roofline -- which evokes the distinctive swoop of the TT's cousin, the VW Passat -- almost seems to be ducking to get out of the way of the wind. Even in a simple sketch by Thomas on a piece of notebook paper, the TT radiates energy and speed -- but also conveys a heft that is often absent in sports cars.

Thomas turns back to the Prowler for a minute, with its hooded roofline and its squinting side windows. "They look aggressive because they're so small," he says. "It's an illusion of stealthiness. It's like Alfred Hitchcock in that classic pose of his -- in profile, partially in shadow. He's trying to convey stealthiness -- he's creating a sense of mystery." It's a different way of envisioning cars -- as a series of silhouettes. On a nearby street, an ordinary minivan pulls away from a stop sign, catching Thomas's eye. "The minivan was a new silhouette when Chrysler invented it," he says. "It had never been done before. The Jeep Cherokee was a new silhouette, too." And it is in silhouette that the Accord and the Camry, the Taurus and the Century, and all of the other "committee" cars look so unoriginal.

Out at Woodward Avenue, Thomas grins as a girl in a 1950s Corvette convertible cruises by. She's got a video camera aimed at the passing parade. "Look at that!" he enthuses. "The 1950s designers were full of optimism, euphoria, motion. It was the age of the jet. The cars expressed that culture, and influenced that culture."