Roadside Attraction: Viaduc des Arts in Paris---- Abandoned Infrastructure Comes Alive

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Old structures, and old infrastructure, represent one of the most underutilized resources in modern cities.  The Viaduc des Arts in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris, not far from the new Paris Opera building, catches your eye when you visit the city late in the 20th century.  During a week's stay, you're so taken with the place you visit it twice.  Even on a rainy day, it feels magnetic and alive...

The Viaduc des Arts, together with the Promenade Plantée above it, finds a new purpose for a railway line opened in 1859 and abandoned 110 years later.  Architect Patrick Berger's proposal was accepted in 1988 by the city, and it centered on the idea of using the 1.5 kilometers of viaduct with its 64 brick and stone arches to provide a theme for a new kind of urban space.

Renovation of the spaces beneath the arches began in 1994, and they were all occupied by 1997, the year of my visit, by restaurants and cafés, artists' studios and galleries, and a tourist office. Architect Berger recessed full-height glazing on each side of the vaulted spaces for dramatic shadow lines, and for a transparent connection linking the pedestrian spaces flanking the viaduct.

Above the renovated arches stretching along Avenue Daumesnil, landscape architect Jacques Vergely and architect Philippe Mathieux created a linear park linking the Place de la Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes.  Stairways ascending from the shops, restaurants and galleries under the arches reveal a green, landscaped space with seating at key vantage points.  The park was designed in 1988 and opened to the public in 1993.

The linear park provides the visual intrigue of looking out at the city's buildings and some of  its heretofore hidden spaces from a height of around ten meters.  Sometimes the resulting vantage points remind you of perspectives by Piranesi...

…and sometimes they are like dreams, as with this wayside niche tucked away in the lush greenery along the garden path.

Through a curtain of leaves and branches you catch a glimpse of a postmodern police headquarters building...

Beyond the trees you catch a better glimpse of the building, a neo-Streamline Moderne design from 1991 by architect Manolo Nunez-Yanowsky, which features statues based upon Michelangelo's "Death of a Slave" buttressing the two inset stories at the top...

This rounded, stepped-back corner overlooks the intersection of Avenue Daumesnil and Rue de Rambouillet. 

Continuing your walk, you pass through a shady arbor into a garden organized around a long reflecting pool, flanked by apartment buildings reflecting a variety of styles and eras.

The Promenade Plantée was one of the locations used during filming of Before Sunset in 2003, with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, perhaps because director Richard Linklater appreciated visual romance and spatial intrigue as a backdrop for his tale of emotional intrigue. 

The architects and landscape designers used happenstance and juxtapositions of existing features, like the dramatic gap between two apartment buildings above, to lend drama to features like the modern suspension bridge that aligns with it...

Your nearly mile-long meander through the Promenade Plantée finally sends you across a modern pedestrian bridge into a green bowl of a park surrounded by apartments, restaurants and shops. On a warm spring day, joggers pass over a lawn populated by strolling families, kids kicking soccer balls, and couples walking dogs. Your walk, like the realized vision of the architects and landscape designers, knits together perspectives of a complex, active and vibrant city into something like a template for urban community in the 21st century.  Later projects, like the High Line in New York City, may have taken their inspiration from this brave decision to bring an old piece of infrastructure, and the potential of a whole neighborhood, alive.

*Footnote:  We journeyed deeper into the past for the Paris street scenes in "Lost Roadside Attraction: 70s Car Shows on Paris Streets and at the Parc des Expos",  posted April 19, 2021.  

Photo Credits:
Top, 6th from top, 11th from top (Police Bldg.): Wikimedia 

4th from top:  semaest.fr

12th from top:  Flickr.com

All other photos:  the author

Worst Car Designs Revisited: Computerized Conformism + Fear of Color

The vehicle pictured below is a current-model Lexus RX. It appears here because it summarizes a number of prevailing fashions in today's car design. These include computer-derived (and perhaps computer-driven) forms dominated by a profusion of unrelated slashes and creases, cartoonish exaggeration of lights and grilles into hostile-looking robot faces, and use of blackout graphics to erode visual clarity... for example the curving black shape behind the rear door masquerading as a big window under a cantilevered roof where neither exists. Oh, and one more thing: a generalized avoidance of anything like real color...

At the other end of the size scale (and the environmental concern scale too) the latest Toyota Prius manages a bit more visual coherence, but the lights and air intakes are contorted into the same kind of robotic grimace we see in products from lots of car makers these days. Subconsciously, anyway, the publicity crew at Toyota seems to have found the nondescript light gray color boring, judging by where they parked it for a shot of color...

Even Mazda, whose recent design efforts stand out for their directness, simplicity and clarity, seems to be a bit nervous about color.  Their Vision Coupe won the award for best concept car at the 2018 Geneva Show, but the color seems to have been chosen to blend into the gray background of the exhibition hall…

It wasn't always thus. When Bertone offered color choices on their Marcello Gandini-designed bodies for the startling transverse V12 mid-engined Lamborghini Miura in 1967, they included phosphorescent shades of lime green, yellow and orange that suited the car's extroverted character...

…and that visage, with its eyelash vents framing the headlights over the sly grin of the air intake, faces the world with way more optimism than the robotic frown of the Lexus.  It's enough to make you want to go for a drive, isn't it?

When this 1968 specimen was restored, the owner decided to abandon the white paint job for a period-correct lime green, and wisely decided to go with the blue interior, so the result is a bit like something out of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color.  It's not a car you could ever lose in the monotony of a shopping mall parking lot...

Studio Bertone was a scene of restless creativity in this period.  The year after the Miura was released, Gandini went off in a completely different direction, forsaking the harmonious, balanced curves of that car with this wedge form for the Alfa Romeo Carabo. Another mid-engined effort, this time based on the Type 33 chassis with its 2 liter longitudinal V8, the glassy Carabo with its signature scissor doors wound up displayed on the bedroom walls of school kids everywhere…right next to their posters of the Miura.

The bright green scheme with orange stripe was another color choice straight out of Josef Albers. It's too bad Bertone and Alfa Romeo only managed to cough up one Carabo. If they'd built more, they might've gotten around to building a bronze one with a blue stripe.  Even a mouse gray one would've made plenty of drivers happy.  It wasn't like this car was ever going to fade into the background...

Over in the world of road racing, theories of pure form yielded to the demands of boundary layer air control and downforce.  By 1973, when BMW got serious about racing their CSL, they had to interrupt the simple planes of the standard car shown below…

They added an air dam to counteract front end lift, warped the fenders to cover wider tires, placed a boundary air control device over the rear window, and added the famous finned spoiler to the deck lid, transforming the somewhat minimalist coupe into the Batmobile...

Fortunately, the graphic designers at BMW Motorsport were  ready with a splash of color that tied this zany mix together, emphazising one of the few features remaining from the original, that horizontal ledge running around the car.  There wasn't much anyone could do to distract from that cow-catcher of an air dam, though...

Meanwhile, the different worlds of art critics and road racers collided in 1975 when racer and auctioneer Hervé Poulain convinced Alexander Calder to paint the first of a series of BMW Art Cars. Calder had already become famous for his series of abstract mobiles, but his CSL proved itself to be even more mobile than those works when Poulain, Sam Posey and Jean Guichet entered it in the 1975 Le Mans 24 Hours.  Sidelined by a prop shaft failure after 7 hours, it was one of the last works completed by Calder, who died the next year without ever crossing the threshold into design by computer, and apparently without ever experiencing the slightest fear of form or color...

*Footnote:  We last visited the overall state of car design in "Worst Car Designs Ever: Late Entries in the Sweepstakes", posted August 1, 2017.  This revisited a theme we explored in a 4-part series beginning with "Worst Car Designs Ever: A Tale of Two Darts", posted July 29, 2016.   

Postscript:  One reader thought the new BMW M4 rated inclusion with our examples of angry-looking robot transformer cars.  The BMW USA website extolls the "unmistakable frameless vertical twin-kidney grille" of the new M4 Competition Coupe.  Road & Track notes that there is already an after-market nose with less cartoonish effect available.  When your new car spawns a cottage industry offering a better front end design, your "unmistakable" design may be a plain old mistake...

Photo Credits:
Top:  Toyota Motor Sales, USA

2nd:  wikimedia

3rd:   newatlas.com

4th & 5th: the author

6th:  LT Jonathan D. Asbury, USN

7th:  youtube.com

8th:  wikimedia

9th:  the author

10th & 11th:  LT Jonathan D. Asbury, USN

12th:  BMW Art Car Collection

Postscript photo:  BMW USA

Morgan SLR & Plus 4 Plus: Morgan Goes Modern…Almost

Across almost four decades, glimpsed fleetingly on the starting grid at a forgotten race track on a lazy summer afternoon, a race car waits in the heat.  Its polished alloy bodywork glints in the sun, a seeming protest against its obscurity even back then…

…when the car was already two decades old.  In 1963, when John Sprinzel and Chris Lawrence built this Morgan SLR (Sprinzel LawrenceTune Racing), leaving off the paint may have been a weight-saving measure.  It also worked pretty well as an attention-getting measure.  It got my attention, anyway, on that afternoon at Second Creek Raceway* all those years ago.

The SLR story began when racers John Sprinzel and Chris Lawrence were approached by Triumph racer Neil Dangerfield to make his TR4 more competitive in English club racing.  As the rules allowed new bodywork, Sprinzel and Lawrence decided to go with an aerodynamic coupe form, and approached Chris Spender and Charlie Williams at Williams & Pritchard to design and fabricate the shell.  Dangerfield was successful at racing that Triumph SLR, and it led Chris Lawrence, who'd already scored a class win at the 1962 Le Mans in a Morgan Plus 4 with stock bodywork, to apply the same formula to the slightly longer Morgan chassis (96-inch wheelbase) with its steel ladder frame and sliding-pillar front suspension. While the standard Plus 4 tourer featured front disc brakes and rear drums, Sprinzel and Lawrence chose 4-wheel discs.  Both Triumph and Morgan production cars used the same pushrod 4-cylinder TR4 engine back then, but Sprinzel and Lawrence modified the head and exhaust, raised the compression and added Weber carbs to get as much as 156 hp from 2.1 liters.  An SLR covered the 0 to 60 run in 6.1 seconds, and was timed topping out at 136 mph.  The photo below shows how far back the driver was placed in the chassis, and also the steep windshield angle, unusual on an English design in this era.

You might think that the Morgan factory adopted the SLR design and made a flotilla of them, judging by this picture of three SLRs lined up at a vintage race meeting...

But you'd be wrong.  Sprinzel and Lawrence made only 3 Morgan SLRs after that first Triumph SLR, which is pictured below. The smooth, aerodynamic design has been compared to the E-Type Jaguar as well as the Corvette Sting Ray from the same era.  The sharp crease that wraps around the tail recalls the latter, and the shape of the rear window and roofline the former...

The Morgan and Triumph SLRs have all survived, and have appeared together recently on the track. Triumph had its own independent road racing project, involving twin-cam engines, Italian bodies and chassis tuning by Conrero*, but the Morgan SLRs were the most modern Morgans to appear up until this time, despite or perhaps because of the fact  they were not an official Morgan factory effort.

Perhaps emboldened by the SLR design team's resolute attempt to drag their chassis further into the 20th century, Morgan management decided to modernize.  They went with a lightweight fiberglass body over the steel frame and plywood floor on the Plus 4 Plus, which appeared the year after the Sprinzel and Lawrence effort, in 1964. Weight was only 1,800 pounds, and top speed was about 5 mph higher than the square-rigged Plus 4 roadster with the same Triumph TR4 engine. The example below showed up at a vintage race in the 1980s.  This was a rare appearance, as the fixed-roof coupe was intended as a GT car...

But all appearances by the Plus 4 Plus were rare, as the factory in Malvern Link only managed to crank out 26 copies in 4 years.  Perhaps traditionalists were offended by this attempt at modernism, and modernists (people who liked the Lotus Elan, for example) thought it didn't go far enough. Styling was a tentative mix of traditional British (the tight, upright-looking roof, the grille shape and character line along the flanks) and modern if not trendy (the recessed tail panel).  Overall, the impression was clean, but as the British would say, neither fish nor fowl.

So Morgan went back to its traditional Plus 4 roadster with ash framing supporting traditional Thirties-era alloy panels on top of its steel ladder chassis, causing a bit of excitement when they installed the aluminum block Rover (née Buick) V8 in 1968. This Plus 8 sold well by Morgan standards, and stayed in production until 2004, overlapping the Aero 8 model which Morgan introduced in 2000. That's shown below. The Aero 8 was intended to be Morgan's idea of a modern car.  Modern in this case meant an aluminum chassis, four-wheel independent suspension, and a 4.4 liter BMW V8 with 6-speed Getrag transmission.  Perhaps fearing they'd suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar century, the design team decided to have it both ways, with narrow cabin inset from traditional fenders, and a miniature version of the old Plus 4 grille, and modern compound headlights cribbed from VW's New Beetle staring at each other across a concave air intake.

Things did not improve at the rear, where the deck aero spoiler sits uncomfortably on top of rounded fender forms that could be from a late 40s Lea Francis or Alvis. Visually it was a comprehensive disaster, but dynamically, the car was supposed to be fun.  Perhaps as a result, over 270 of the Series 1 and Series 2 Aero 8 (the ones with the cross-eyed look) found buyers...

Meanwhile, the minions of Malvern Link were figuring out a more compelling way to connect with their past.  Morgan had made famous 3-wheelers from the beginning; the V-twin, air-cooled models ran from 1911 to 1939 and overlapped the Ford-powered side valve inline fours built from 1932 to 1952. Morgan's new old idea was to reintroduce their trike with a high-torque, 2-liter V-twin built by S & S. Disc brakes and roll bars were concessions to the 21st century, but the look, down to the exposed air-cooled engine and the narrow-gauge tires, could've passed for Edwardian.  Morgan Cars introduced their new 3-Wheeler to celebrate the firm's centenary, in 2011...

Five years later, Morgan showed a prototype of an electric 3-Wheeler.  Without an old-fashioned internal combustion engine cantilevered past the front axle, and with clever details like the toothlike brass cooling fins* and asymmetrical placement of the upper headlight, the EV3 managed to combine steampunk eccentricity with 21st century detailing in a way the Aero 8 had completely missed.  It's too bad, then, that no production EV3 ever appeared.  Morgan Cars announced early in 2020 that none would ever appear, due to the failure of the briefly-revived Frazer-Nash* concern to deliver power units.  Frazer-Nash Research, which had also promised hybrid power plants for their own namesake production car, went bankrupt in 2018, and parent company Kamkorp Group followed it into receivership in 2020, but not before sinking an effort to revive the Bristol make as well. For a time it appeared that all paths leading to failed British classic car revivals went through Frazer-Nash or Kamkorp.  Too bad, as the EV3 looked like lots of fun, and free of carbon guilt...

*Footnote:  The other cars we found racing at Second Creek in the early Eighties are pictured in "Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Road Racers at Second Creek, Colorado", posted May 21, 2021.  The styling of the Morgan Aero 8 was given a critical analysis in "Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 4: Final Finalists", posted August 11, 2016.  Virgilio Conrero's twin-cam Triumph Le Mans GT is pictured in "The Etceterini Files Part 12", posted November 28, 2017.  More recently, we told the story of the attempted revival of the Frazer-Nash in "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 3: Frazer-Nash, the 3rd Time Around", from April 30, 2021.  The EV3's cooling fins, by the way, were supposed to be for the electric motor, but that was at the other end of the car, and we'd thought it was more often batteries that needed cooling.

Photo Credits:
Top:  the author

2nd:  motorhistory.tumblr.com

3rd:  flickr.com

4th & 6th:  gomog.com

5th:  rhclassic.co.uk

7th:  the author

8th:  wikimedia

9th & 10th:  bringatrailer.com

11th & bottom:  Morgan Cars