Stutz: The Car that Made Good in a Day

In 1911, a race car built in less that a month and a half by Harry Stutz's Stutz Auto Parts Company placed 11th in  the first-ever running of the Indianapolis 500, which was won by a Marmon*. This was an encouraging enough result for Stutz to coin the slogan "The Car That Made Good in a Day" and to set up the Ideal Motor Company to make copies of the racer, outfitted with fenders and a sketchy, looking-glass windshield. One of the advanced technical features of the big, 389 cubic inch inline four was its four valves per cylinder, a theme Stutz engineers would revisit a couple decades later.  Ideal Motor Co. became Stutz Motor Co., but Harry Stutz left the year after World War I to start the HCS line of cars and also to make fire engines. The new owner, Allan A. Ryan Sr., attempted a stock manipulation scheme in the early 1920s which bankrupted the company, and the receivers brought in Fred Moscovics in 1923.  He refocused the company on safety, introducing low-chassis designs for improved handling and pioneering the use of safety glass... 

By 1925, Fred Moskovics had revived the moribund Stutz concern, capitalizing on the potential of engineer C.R. Greuther's engine design, developing the Vertical Eight into the SV-16. This was a single-overhead cam design with crossflow head and two spark plugs per cylinder. In the 1928 Blackhawk Speedster shown below, it developed 115 hp from 298 cubic inches at a leisurely 3,600 rpm.  It was reliable enough that in 1928 a Stutz finished 2nd to the winning Bentley at Le Mans. The Blackhawk features the briefly-fashionable Woodlites, headlights with a parabolic internal section and narrow aperture.  

Moscovics had plans to improve on this performance, and by spring of 1931 introduced the DV-32 version of the inline 8.  This displaced 322 cubic inches and made 156 hp. The "DV-32" designation reflects the dual camshafts and 32 valves, design elements featured on only one other American production car at the time, the Duesenberg J. This approach had already been proven on racing engines by Ballot, Peugeot, Miller and Delage.  Like those cars, the twin cams were overhead rather than side-mounted as on Riley and ERA racers. The twin-ignition of the SV-16 was replaced by a single, centrally-mounted spark plug in the cross-flow combustion chamber...The boat-tail body of this DV-32 in the Clive Cussler Collection reflects design elements seen also on Packards and Auburns of the era.

By 1932 Stutz had revived the Bearcat name for its high performance model, the short chassis Super Bearcat.  The DV-32 engine fronted a Weymann fabric body mounted on a short 116 inch wheelbase.  The Weymann material was often called "synthetic leather" but it was a patented, lightweight fabric covering also used on aircraft of this era, and produced a surface finish oddly predictive of the matte paint finishes which are now, for some reason, in fashion...  

The body designs for the last Stutz cars were rooted, like the Duesenberg designs, in the themes of the Twenties, with flowing, open-sided fenders, vertical radiator grilles, and incorporating lights, spare tires and running boards as distinct, decorative elements.  The helmeted hood ornament recalls the Twenties fashion for Egyptian motifs, while the helmet's chromed wings look forward to the coming Streamline Moderne movement.

The Stutz twin-cam power unit offered enough smoothness to be used in luxury models like the 1932 DV-32 Town Car shown below.  The original long chassis with 134.5 inch wheelbase was re-bodied to a design by LeBaron.

The elegant low-roofed 1930 Monte Carlo sedan below sported a Weymann fabric body and the SV-16 inline 8 engine. The engine designation here indicates that the engine featured a single overhead cam and 16 valves, the usual 2 per cylinder.

By 1932 Stutz offered the DV-32 engine in the Monte Carlo body style, along with the Super Bearcat and a handsome Waterhouse-bodied coupe called the Continental. The Monte Carlo shown below is a 1933 model with DV-32 power. Sadly, however, the power and elegance on display in Stutz showrooms was not enough to save the company from the effects of the Great Depression, and Stutz discontinued production in 1935 after making around 35,000 cars over its history. 

*Footnote: Stutz is reviewed along with other makes manufactured in Indiana, including the Marmon that won that first Indy 500, in the post from 9/1/15, entitled "Looking Back: When Indy was Indie."  The origins of the twin overhead cam, 4 valve per cylinder racing engine are reviewed in "On the Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 1" on 8/18/19.

Photo Credits:

Top:  wikimedia

2nd:  Paul Anderson

3rd:  flickr.com

4th:  the author

5th thru 7th:  rmsothebys.com

8th:  globeandmail.com

9th:  the author

10th + 11th:  bonhams.com

12th: youtube.com

Chicago's Architecture Biennial 2019: A Tale of Two Glass Houses

This year's third Chicago Architecture Biennial, which closes January 5, was destined from its inception to be more than a survey of form and style.  Other shows have offered ideas for visitors interested in renovating their houses; this one was more about renovating our society.  Entitling the show "…And Other Such Stories", artistic director Yesomi Umolu invited an international array of participants to explore 4 themes. These were "No Land Beyond", focusing on landscape and ecological context, "Appearances and Erasures", addressing histories, memory and monuments, "Rights and Reclamations" relating to activism by archiitects and planners, and finally "Common Ground."  The Chicago Cultural Center on Michigan Avenue offered 70,000 square feet of exhibits as a starting point for exploring related events all around the city.  The first exhibit that greets the visitor is housed in four humble, gable-roofed glass houses designed by MASS Design Group and artist Hank Willis Thomas*. Entitled the Gun Violence Memorial Project, it is what it claims to be...

Each house represents an average week's toll of gun fatalities in the United States (about 700 people); taken together, the four glass houses represent a month's toll.  Brick-shaped spaces lining the outer walls permit display of personal effects of victims, including cameras, jewelry, stuffed animals and toys..

Interviews conducted with victim's families are projected on screens above the displays.  I stopped for a long moment to consider the inscription above the toy truck shown on the shelf below: "Arthur Kenneth Jones: 1997-2007"...

An installation prepared by FICA, a Brazilian non-profit devoted to affordable housing in Sao Paulo, allows the visitor to walk through a life-size space of one of their renovated apartments; the floor plan, including bath, kitchen appliances and furniture, is etched (logically enough) on the floor. Videos show interviews with the apartment's occupants, who express satisfaction at finding modern, affordable housing in the city.  The revelation for the visitor is that the happy parents are raising 3 small children in a space of only 570 square feet, about the size of an American studio apartment...

Another exhibit expands on passive solar ideas pioneered by Steve Baer of Zomeworks in the 1970s.  The faceted plywood modules could be quickly erected to provide nearly instant, solar-heated housing in emergencies, or in the context of the "long emergency" presented by persistent homelessness in nearly all our urban areas... 

The Anthony Overton Elementary School, designed by Perkins & Will in 1963 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, was the subject of a controversial closure in 2013, and is now the subject of collaborative studies by studioBASAR, Borderless Studio, and Zorka Wollny, among others, as it begins the transition to an enterpreneurship center for Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. The renovation of this important structure may provide a critical community gathering space and business incubator in an underserved, neglected neighborhood. The building's generous expanse of window walls reflects the International Style, while the broad horizontals of the eaves provide a link to Wright's work, and in the photo below, a precarious perch for gathered students, who are perhaps wondering what comes next...

Biennial events are scheduled all over the city, and include films, lectures and even musical and dance presentations.  The events extend into the suburbs, and this year the Elmhurst Art Museum opened its renovated McCormick House, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1952, to the public.  Designed for developer Robert McCormick III, who had worked with Mies on the 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive high-rise apartments, it was intended as a prototype for affordable, manufactured modular housing…

The plan displaces two similarly-sized rectilinear blocks around a carport with the entry foyer at the intersection.  This allows for a utilitarian wing with kitchen, utility room and children's rooms, as well as a wing with living room, master bedroom and study.

Steel framing allowed floor-to-ceiling permiteter glazing with the same window units and vertical steel I-sections as at the Lake Shore Drive buildings, but here the steel was painted white instead of black, and the blank end walls were brick. 

McCormick partnered with Herbert Greenwald to build this first house as a model to attract buyers for the modular housing scheme, but not enough advance orders were placed to fund the project. McCormick moved into the house with his wife Isabella Gardner, who wrote two books while living there. In 1961 the house was rented to a family with six children, providing a test of its real-world livability.  In 1963, Ray and Mary Ann Fick bought the house and raised their two sons there, staying nearly 3 decades... 

Among the challenges of living in a mostly-glass house were keeping the rooms cool in summer (long expanses of glazing faced west) and warm in winter (glazing was not the insulated variety). There was also the issue of screening off the private spaces from public exposure, but over the decades Mother Nature took care of that...

By the 1980s, the lush growth of trees and foliage lent the McCormick House two attributes Mies had neglected to provide: shade and privacy. The Fick family sold the house to the Elmhurst Fine Arts & Civic Center Foundation in 1991, and the Foundation moved the house to the campus for their future museum in 1994. It was joined on site by the new Elmhurst Art Museum in 1997. 

Among the changes resulting from the move was reorienting the west elevation to the south, and reconfiguring the interior for use by the Foundation and Museum stalff as office and conference spaces.  Initially the house was connected to the museum by an enclosed passageway, but this has been removed in the most recent renovation to expose the original carport.

Mies liked to say that "God is in the details", but he avoided some kinds of details because they were hard to reconcile with his spare, stripped-down minimalism.  One example is the complete lack of gutters and downspouts on a flat-roofed building…in Illinois, where rain and snow are plentiful.  Instead, the photo above shows some odd plumbing directing water from the roof downward to the ground plane.

The interior spaces, though, reflect the openness and lightness that were supposed to suit the open minds and egalitarian attitudes of the postwar era.  In the latest renovation, the bedrooms and living room have been refurnished in a style fitting the original, using some pieces designed by Mies and by Lilly Reich.

The Art Msueum's plan is to rebuild the kitchen and baths to match the original, so that the house will return to the original configuration of the modular prototype as proposed by Mies and McCormick. On the day I visited the McCormick House, I was alone in it the whole time. Perhaps society is no more ready today for a transparent, modular house than it was in 1952. Or maybe even getting the details right will not satisfy the consumer unless the details are part of a compelling and, equally important, affordable scheme.  God may indeed be in the details, but if we don't come up with a coherent design for living as a context for those details, our buildings and our cities will fall short of their potential.

*Footnote:  Other participants on the memorial project included the Chicago advocacy group Purpose Over Pain, and Everytown for Gun Safety, a national non-profit focusing on gun violence.

Photo Credits:

Top 3 + 5th from top:  the author

4th + 6th:  archdaily.com

3rd + 4th:  squadrataraschi.it

7th:   Michael Dant, reproduced at miessociety.org

8th:   Elmhurst Museum of Art

9th:   Hedrich Blessing Archives

10th + 11th:  Elmhurst Museum of Art

12th to bottom:  the author 

The Etceterini Files Part 21: The Elusive Giannini V8 Follows Urania, Taraschi & Giaur

You may be wondering why we need to expand our history of Giannini cars and engines to include something called the Giaur, and who Urania and Taraschi were.  Well, you couldn't do a very good job of tracing the history of Martha and the Vandellas, for example, if you just concentrated on Martha, so we'll begin with some of what Hollywood calls "back story". Brothers Attilio and Domenico Giannini got into tuning cars for racing early, first with Italas in 1920 and then Fiats in the 1930s. Bernardo Taraschi began building Urania ("heavenly") racers with BMW motorcycle engines after World War II (possibly using engines from abandoned German army motorcycles), but the search for more power led to his partnership with the Giannini brothers, who had begun modifying Fiat 500 engines, then developed their single overhead cam G1.  The photo below shows a BMW-powered, cycle-fendered Urania racer from the late Forties...

One thing led to another, and eventually they were making an all-Giannini G2 engine with aluminum block and twin overhead cams. By the dawn of the Fifties the Giannini-Taraschi partnership was using this engine in Giaur (GIAnnini + URania) cars and Taraschi cars, and later supplied engines to other makers, including Nardi* for the Bisiluro* ("twin torpedo") designed by architect Carlo Mollino* for the 1955 Le Mans. Here the engine is seen installed in the pod opposite the driver's side of the car. The idea was to balance the weight of driver and engine around the longitudinal centerline of the car...

Confusingly, and also because this was Italy, the Giaur combine kept on making Taraschis as well, but now with the same Giannini G2 engine, an example being the Taraschi Sport 750 from 1956 shown below.  It featured a tubular chassis overlaid with alloy bodywork built by Taraschi...

The combine produced a few closed GT cars like the handsome Giaur 750 San Remo Berlinetta shown below, bodied by Rocco Motto* in 1953.  It's a rare example with full road equipment, including tidy bumpers. The proportions, contours and details deftly conceal the tiny size. Production numbers for the Motto body are lost to history, but are bound to be low... 

More typical cars featuring the Giannini power plant included the Giaur 750 Record from 1954-'55. The first photo shows the car with wind-cheating spats over the wheels...

The Giaur 750 is featured in the Museo Giannini, and is shown below without its wheel spats. Overall form is similar to the Taraschi Sport 750 which appeared a year or so later. As with the San Remo Berlinetta, careful handling of proportions conceals the small size of the car, and details like the air intake and trailing edge of the front wheel opening, which are curved in section as well as elevation, impart a sense of mass unlike the fragility sometimes conveyed by road-racing etceterini... 

Outside the limited-production series of Giaur and Taraschi road racers using their own G2 engine, Giannini also offered some tamer cars with lightly modified Fiat pushrod engines during this period. One example is the 1100TV* Fiat Boano Giannini featured below in an ad for Carrozzeria Boano, which designed and built the body in 1956...

In the late Fifties, Formula Junior, restricted to mass-produced engines of no more than 1,100 cubic centimeters, became the favored entry-level racing series for open-wheel, single-seat road racers. Bernardo Taraschi entered the field with this front-engined design with Fiat power. It achieved success on the track and in the marketplace, and Taraschi would eventually build 63 of these Juniors, with 13 going to the United States, making it the most popular single design produced by this group. The year after the 1960 Taraschi shown below was built, the original Giannini partnership broke up, with Attilio founding Costruzioni Meccaniche Giannini, which would concentrate on designing and building prototypes, including engineering for racing engines. Giannini Automobili split off to run the repair facilities and retail outlets.

Probably the rarest product of the Giannini Meccaniche operation, and of all Giannini-engined cars, is the V8 produced in 1967. There seems to be no technical information published on the car or engine, not even on the Giannini website, and for awhile it seemed to be the Italian equivalent of cartoonist Bruce McCall's French exotic "La Vume" (voom), "a car so exclusive that none will ever be built."  But these photos of a blue and yellow road racer surfaced recently, and they prove that Giannini, like Abarth* and Bandini*, stayed in the etceterini business long enough to join the mid-engine revolution...

Below is a shot of that engine. As we have not found any specifications, it's not clear whether it was developed from two Giannini twin-cam fours on a common crankcase, or was a completely new design. The displacement was under two liters. There are enough visual differences from small V8s by other Italian makes (Abarth, Alfa Romeo, ATS) to confirm it doesn't borrow from them. So tooling cost per unit produced must have been high indeed...

Fiberglass bodywork showed some similarity to the contemporary Porsche 906 in the shape of the nose and headlight covers, as well as in the placement of the rear fender air intakes and the use of plain, bolt-on wheels...

The design of the tail also echoes contemporary road racer practice, with the turned-up spoiler for added downforce; the license plate may indicate that the car was driven on public roads at some point, maybe to the races...

The financial strain of designing and fabricating race cars like this V8 led to the closing of Attilio's Giannini Meccaniche operation in 1971. Giannini Automobili continued to offer lightly modified Fiat production cars. This aspect of the family business continued into the Eighties, but not without one more effort at making a GT car based upon production components. Partnering with coach builder Francis Lombardi* in early 1968, Franco Giannini, son of Domenico, offered a sleek, low two-seater coupe based upon Fiat 850 floor pans and power trains. The Giannini family formed a joint venture with Lombardi called OTAS (Officina Trasformazioni Automobili Sportive) to make cars for the European and American markets. The rear-mounted pushrod fours were offered in sizes up to 1,000cc in the Giannini Grand Prix for Italian consumption, while the OTAS cars exported to the US featured an 817cc engine to avoid emissions regulations.  Abarth offered a 1,300cc pushrod engine in its Scorpione, and a few of these were imported into the US by California dealer Rich Motors in Southern California. The car shown below is a 1971 OTAS from the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. The Lombardi-bodied coupes are likely the best known and most frequently seen descendants of the Giannini car family in the USA.  A registry produced by a Lombardi GP owner in 2015 indicated 140 surviving cars of several hundred built. The earlier cars with Giannini-designed G1 and G2 racing engines, and their Urania relatives, are rarer, with 14 Uranias, 48 Giaur and Taraschi sports cars, and 63 Taraschi Formula Juniors, for a total of 125 cars confirmed by the partners.

Since those days, Giannini has been linked closely to Fiat, offering small modifications to regular production cars.  Recently, though, Giannini Automobili has offered something a bit wilder to celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary of their founding. This is the Giannini 350GP, with a 1.7 liter turbocharged inline 4 from the Alfa Romeo 4C, mid-mounted as in the Alfa, and driving the rear wheels.  The whole ensemble is tucked under a highly modified modern Fiat 500 body, with wide fenders to clear the wheels required to handle the 350 horsepower.  If you live in Europe, you can reconnect with the Giannini tradition for a mere 130,000 Euros...

*Footnote:  In the 21-part (so far) Etceterini Files, we have featured many close relatives of the Giannani and Taraschi cars.  Here's a brief index:  
Nardi Bisiluro:  "Architect Designed Cars Part 1", May 7, 2017
Nardi history: "Etceterini Files Part 14----Enrico Nardi and His Cars: Present at the Creation", Feb. 26, 2018
Rocco Motto: "Unsung Genius: Rocco Mottos, the Closer", March 25, 2018
Fiat 1100TV:  "Etceterini Files Part 9----Plain Old Fiats Plus: 1100TV & 1200TV", Sept. 29, 2016
Francis Lombardi: "Etceterini Files Part 15", Oct. 26, 2018
Abarth: "Etceterini Files Part 13", Jan. 15, 2018
Bandini,  "Etceterini Files Part 8---Bandini, the Art of Endurance", Sept. 18, 2016

Photo Credits:

Top:  pinterest.com
2nd:  dannatavintage.com
3rd & 4th:  squadrataraschi.it
5th:   Giannini Automobili
6th:   automoto.it
7th:   Carrozzeria Boano on classicvirus.com
8th:   AutoMania.it
9th, 11th & 12th:  forum-auto.caradisiac.com  
10th:  retrovisiones.com
13th:  lanemotormuseum.org
14th:  Giannini Automobili

Upstart Challenger: When Pietro Frua Designed a Dodge

For 1969, Elwood Engel's "Fuselage Chryslers" presented a clean alternative to the increasingly baroque big cars from GM and Ford which followed the brief mid-Sixties fashion for clean, trim lines. The Fuselage Chryslers, though oversized like the other "standard sized" Big Three offerings, exhibited mostly undecorated flanks and lots of what designers call "tumble-home", the inward slope of the greenhouse in section.  For the 1970 model year, when Chrysler announced its E-body replacements for the Plymouth Barracuda as well as the first Dodge Challenger, the cars had long-hood, short-deck proportions like the Mustang and Camaro but with more "tumble-home" and also what I call "tuck-under."  Not sure what designers call it, but this is the inward slope of the flanks towards the rocker panels, and it nicely exposed the wider wheels and tires then coming into vogue. 

Unlike GM, which had used the same basic body shells for its Camaro and Firebird twins, Chrysler budgeted for a larger body shell on the Challenger, much as Ford had done for the Mercury Cougar derived from the Mustang.  As a result, the Challenger (above) rode on a 110" wheelbase and was 4.6" longer than the Barracuda* (below) which had 108" between wheel centers. Carl Cameron's design for the Challenger was also 1.2" wider than John Herlitz's Barracuda, and the photo above shows how this aspect was highlighted by the ridge stamped into the Dodge's flanks, running from head to tail lights and following the arc of the rear fenders. The Barracuda shown below highlights the tumble-home as well as the tuck-under of Herlitz's design, which has a more sheer and spare treatment of the flanks than the Challenger. It would look even cleaner without the "shaker" hood scoop and the vinyl roof, which was to the 70s what wraparound, dogleg windshields were to the late 50s. The frontal aspect on the Plymouth may show influence of Giugiaro's designs for the Iso S4 and DeTomaso Mangusta. Car designers, after all, went to shows and read the car mags...

The Barracuda also kept details simple with single headlights (except for 1972) and by offering body-colored front bumpers.  Comparing the Plymouth above with the Dodge below shows how the Challenger's more deeply sculptured flanks generated different shadow lines. Notice how the curve of the Barracuda's rear fender is formed into a distinct ledge below the window sill that fades into the front door stamping.  On the Challenger below, the top of the rear fender actually becomes the window sill, and the side rear window arc follows the roof line, while the Barracuda has a slightly more angular window profile.  These differences were subtle but required expensive tooling for each car line, and showed that the design team must have enjoyed some freedom before the corporate budget-cutters came in.

The budget cutters were in control before 1974, which was the last year for these E-bodies. Declining sales in the "pony-car" sector resulted from increasing insurance rates and concerns about fuel economy which arrived with the Arab oil embargo in '73.  With the passage of time, though, the relative rarity of these cars compared with Mustangs and Camaros, as well as the reputation for performance gained by offering the most extensive engine options (including the 426 Hemi*) meant that the forsaken E-bodies gained fans among collectors. By the time the Daimler-Chrysler marriage ended in 2007, the company had completed designs and tooling for a new Challenger, including key elements like Mercedes S-Class front suspension and E-Class 5-link rear suspension.  The car made its debut in February 2008, and echoed many of the exterior design themes of the original Challenger, such as the roof shape and break line curving along the flanks, here as a simple change of section rather than the incised ridge of the original...

Another difference was that the new car was not a true pillarless hardtop like the original. Despite the presence of that body type in the Mercedes lineup when the new Dodge was planned, designers opted for a conventional B-pillar. And there seemed to be a lot less tumble-home and tuck-under in the new design.  The more vertical sides and roof section are visible in the photo below...

The photo below shows off the more restrained form, perhaps a result of packaging concerns. The decision to go with the B-pillar meant that the space between B and C pillars was filled with a tiny trapezoid of vision glass which is made to look larger by edging it with a black glass border. Despite a few clunky details, the car was convincing on the road, with engine options eventually well beyond the original Hemi's power, the supple Mercedes-derived suspension and modern antilock disc brakes. It sold well, was kept in production after the Fiat takeover of Chrysler in 2009, and is still in production...

If Fiat had been looking for a Challenger design to remind them a bit more of home, they might have had a look at the 1971 Challenger shown below, as it was rebodied by Italy's Pietro Frua*, better known for work on products from Maserati, BMW* and Monteverdi*...

The handsome fastback has plenty of tumble-home as well as tuck-under. Just look at the way it displays those deep wire wheels, which were already becoming an anachronism in 1971 but still look great. The crease linking the front air intake with the tail creates the border between tumble-home and tuck-under, provides a dramatic shadow line and also gives an excuse to animate the wheel arches with those flared openings. On a car where there's almost no surface decoration, these deft maneuvers give the form real impact.

Note also that like the 2007 Challenger, the Frua version has a B-pillar. Unlike it, the car offers real vision between B and C-pillars, as well as out the generous rear hatch. The tail lights appear to have been taken from a period Alfa Berlina, but like everything else, they work.  If Fiat Chrysler decides to go Retro again when they redesign the current Challenger, they could look in worse places than here...

*Footnotes: For a history of another Frua-designed, Chrysler-powered car, see "The Etceterini Files Part 20---Monteverdi and MBM" from July 19, 2019.  Other designs by Frua are featured in "Forgotten Classics: Frua Designs for Hans Glas and BMW" from Dec. 2, 2018. For another look at the Plymouth Barracuda, as well as Ghia-bodied Chrysler show cars, see "What Defines a Production Car, and Why Would Anybody Pay $3 Million for One?" in the Archives for August 29, 2015. 

Photo Credits:

Top thru 3rd from top:  Chrysler Corporation

4th thru 6th:  Fiat Chrysler Automobiles

7th:  en.wheelsage.org

8th & 9th:  webcarstory.com