Roadside Attraction: Larz Anderson Auto Museum

Ages ago, before Google Maps, this writer got lost on the way to the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, having been stymied by Boston's spiderweb pattern of often one-way streets.  The museum staff kindly held the place open for 15 minutes past closing so an exhibit of French cars could be photographed. Those photos have long been misplaced in a dusty shoebox somewhere, but a frequent contributor* visited the Larz Anderson before the pandemic descended, and found proof that the Museum still appreciates French cars.  Above and below, we see a Delahaye* 135M roadster with body by Figoni & Falaschi*. This design, with teardrop fenders and skirts enclosing the wheels, first appeared in 1937, and only a handful were built.

Joseph Figoni, the designer for the Paris coachbuilding duo, liked to trace sine waves in the air while telling customers, "I like the streamline."  After the mid-1930s his custom coachwork appeared on bespoke chassis like Delage, Delahaye, and Talbot-Lago*.   Aside from a Bugatti Type 55 roadster, Figoni did little work on Bugattis, and none on the Type 57. The cabriolet below, with "standard" T57 specification (a 3.3 liter unsupercharged twin-cam straight 8, smaller but more powerful than the contemporary Delahaye's 3.5 liter six), was bodied by Gangloff in Alsace.

Another example of French industry, a 1924 Renault Torpedo shares the library with a motorcycle.  The Torpedo, a rear-wheel drive car powered by an inline four-cylinder engine, was happy at about 35 mph and weighed just under 1,900 pounds. The famous prow configuration results from the radiator placement behind the engine...

The Mercedes 170V roadster, built during the dark years of 1936-'42, was, like the Renault, a humble production car.  A 1.7 liter inline four made 38 hp, and with 75,000 built in all styles, the 170V was the most popular Mercedes Benz up to that time.  The "V" designation indicated the front engine, differentiating it from the rear-engined 170 H, which was a flop... 

Perhaps a greater artistic success, if not a commercial one, was this 1930 Cord L-29, which was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg combine's front-wheel drive pioneer when introduced in 1929, just in time for the economic downturn that became the Great Depression.  The first front-drive American production car, the Lycoming straight 8-powered L-29 continued through the 1932 model year.

In an even more stratospheric price class, the 1927 Rolls Royce Derby Phantom 1 featured an inline 6-cylinder engine just under 7.7 liters, with overhead valves in an aluminum head.  The Phantom 1 replaced the Silver Ghost in 1925, offering enhanced (but unstated) power and smoothness.  The Derby moniker differentiates this British-built Rolls from those built at the Springfield, Massachusetts factory Rolls Royce opened in 1921, and which built over 2,900 cars before closing in 1931. 

Aiming at a more modest clientele, World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker started a car-building firm in 1922, introducing 4-wheel brakes in '23 and adding an 8 cylinder to the 6 cylinder line in 1925.  The insignia on the radiator is the "hat in a ring" emblem from the 94th FIghter Squadron. Rickenbacker built around 35,000 cars before the end of production in 1927...

At the Italian concours on the Museum grounds, a mid-Fifties OSCA* MT4 gleams  in the sun. Built in 1,100cc and 1,500cc sizes, the MT4 represents the best efforts of the Maserati brothers after they sold their eponymous company to the Orsi family. A favorite of Briggs Cunningham and Stirling Moss, who won the '54 Sebring 12 Hours outright driving Cunningham's 1,500cc version, beating Ferraris, Maseratis and Jaguars with up to 3 times the power, the sweet-handling MT4 featured DOHC inline fours under alloy bodywork by Morelli or Frua.  Only around six dozen were sold, at prices of $9,000 to $10,000...

Alfisti were represented on the Museum lawn by a range of Milano's best...

Including the photographer's 2000 GTV from 1974.

Also including the relatively rare Montreal from the early Seventies.  Like the GTV, the Montreal was bodied by Bertone, but styled by Gandini instead of Giugiaro...

Non-Alfisti might be surprised to find that the Montreal above, with its 2.6 liter 4-cam V8 derived from Alfa's Type 33 road racer, shared its basic chassis design with the four cylinder Giulia 105 Series, and thus, with the comparitively simple Junior Z below, bodied in steel by Zagato from 1969 in 1,300cc engine size. Zagato introduced a 1600cc version in '72, with a slightly bigger trunk.

The Junior Z shared its shorter wheelbase with the Pininfarina-bodied Duetto spider, built from 1966 through 1969 and now known to fans as the Roundtail...

Alfa rival Lancia introduced its front-drive Flavia sedan in 1960 with 1.5 liter aluminum boxer four and four-wheel Dunlop disc brakes.  In 1962 Lancia introduced sport versions, and in typical Lancia (and Italian) style these had completely different body designs by Zagato (an odd scoop-tail fastback), Pininfarina (a clean-lined 2 +2 coupe) and Vignale (the convertible below). Engine size increased to 1.8 and then 2.0 liters before production ended in 1974. But Lancia decided that only the PF coupe deserved a restyle for the upgraded 2000 series; the Vignale and Zagato versions were gone by then...

If Alejandro De Tomaso's Deauville sedan was his knock-off of a Jaguar XJ6, this Longchamp coupe was his echo of the Mercedes 450 SL and SLC series. Styling was by Tom Tjaarda* of Ghia.  The car had a long production run, from 1972 to 1989, but only 409 were sold in that time. This may have been more because of timing  (introduction before the '73 fuel crisis) or pricing (high) than mechanical specification, which was derived from the longer Deauville. It included 4-wheel disc brakes (inboard at the rear), 4-wheel independent suspension by coil springs, and a Ford 351 Cleveland V8 channeling power through a ZF 5-speed gearbox or a Ford C8 automatic.  It would make an interesting car to take to your local Cars & Coffee (the Larz Anderson Museum launches their season on May 14 at 8:30 AM).  If you go, please remember to move the sign away from the car so we can admire it...

At the end of the Ferrari line a Dino 246GT reveals its midship mechanicals to the crowd, while a yellow replica 250GT California snoozes with hood shut. Despite the impressive rise in auction prices for the mid-engined V6 Dinos since the line began in 1967 with the 206GT, nobody has yet attempted to offer an accurate replica of the Pininfarina-designed car. This, despite the wide availability of modern V6 engines designed for transverse mounting, a result of the popularity of front-drive cars since the Eighties.  By the time Shelby AC Cobra prices reached today's Dino levels, there were way more Cobra replicas on the road than real ones...

It's a similar situation with replicas of Ferrari's 250GT California Spyder, of which 50 long wheelbase versions (102.4", from 1958-'60) preceded the 56 short wheelbase cars (94.5") which received front disc brakes and ended production in 1963.  So 106 cars, of which maybe 500 or even more remain today, but only if you count all the  fiberglass-bodied versions by Modena Motors and similar efforts with Ford V8 engines under the hood. Sort of like all those Cobra replicas, only with Pinin Farina styling...

*Footnote:  Delahaye roadsters bodied by Figoni & Falaschi are featured in "Rolling Sculpture" from January 1, 2017 and "Chasing the Streamline" from May 30, 2017. Other designs by Figoni & Falaschi are pictured in "The French Line Part 5: Figoni & Falaschi—Curving Forms for Winding Roads", posted June 7, 2020. Cars from Talbot-Lago, Delahaye's main rival from the Thirties into the Fifties, were profiled in "Talbot-Lago: Darracq by Another Name", posted on May 22, 2020.  The OSCA MT4 was profiled along with other OSCA models in "The Etceterini Files Part 7---  Almost Famous:  OSCA", posted April 20, 2016. And we gave American architect and industrial designer Tom Tjaarda a retrospective in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 4: Tom Tjaarda—Life Before and After the Pantera", posted April 30, 2020.

*Photo Credits:  All photos were generously provided by LCDR Jonathan D. Asbury, USN.  

Ukraine: Architecture Before the Bombs

We interrupt our regularly scheduled, nonessential programming about mid-century architecture and old cars to mention that World Central Kitchen and the International Rescue Committee are still serving refugees from the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.  And now, some pictures of the infrastructure Ukrainian forces are defending...

Colors of the Mikhailovsky Monastery in Kyiv reflect the blue sky and golden wheat fields that inspired Ukraine's flag. These shots were taken by contributor Keith Carlson back in April of 2019, the year Volodymyr Zelensky won the country's  presidential election.  At that point, what the media called "low-level conflict" had been going on in eastern Donbas for around five years, since the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014.  The monastery has reflected the violent history of "the breadbasket of Europe", contested as a prize of great powers in World Wars 1 and 2, and a country which lost 7 million people to World War 2...

Originally built in the medieval period in Byzantine style, the exterior was entirely remodeled in the 18th century in baroque style. The original cathedral and monastery complex was entirely demolished on Stalin's orders in the 1930s, a period when the Soviet dictator's program of forced farming collectivization was causing widespread and preventable starvation. What the above photos show is the structure rebuilt after Ukrainian independence in 1991, and opened to the public 8 years later.

The port city of Odessa is known for its pastel-colored, neo-baroque apartment buildings, and until the latest war, a lively jazz scene.  The Odessa Passage, above, is a 4-story hotel with glass-roofed pedestrian passages that was built in the late 19th century.  The Passage houses shops, restaurants and offices, and is one of the historic buildings now being surrounded with sandbags on streets closed by Ukrainian defense forces.  Below, the legendary Potemkin Stairs, completed in 1841 as a formal entry to Odessa from the harbor,  featured prominently in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin...

Below, two of the apartment buildings with pastel color schemes seemingly designed, as in Scandinavian countries, to fend off cheerless, dark winters...

Below, a geometric roofscape with reddish tiles has something like a Mediterranean atmosphere.

Shown below, the Latin Cathedral in Lviv, Western Ukraine, also known as the Cathedral of the Assumption, was consecrated in 1481.

Outside Lviv in the Shevchenko Grove, the Shevchenkivskyi Hai Museum of Folk Architecture and Crafts includes this ancient wooden church...

A statue in Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, the city in Western Ukraine that has become a focus of refugees fleeing the war, including those traveling to Poland...

After independence and the 2004 and 2014 revolutions, architects designed shopfronts in postmodern and sometimes surrealist motifs that contrasted with the traditional architecture of the facades.

Tourists, however, were drawn to the classic examples of Ukrainian architecture, etched sharply under the vast blue sky, and the bright colors of the images on the Orthodox churches.  

Remembered for rejecting proposed ties to the European Union for closer ties to Russia, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's president from 2010 to 2014, was also known for using public funds to build a bloated palace for himself, complete with gold plumbing fixtures and the car collection housed in this vast garage...

The cars reflect the same taste as those gold plumbing fixtures, consisting mostly of big limousines favored by the Soviet-backed nomenklatura, the bureaucrats who ran the governments of Eastern Bloc countries. There are a few more mainstream Russian products, like the late 50s-early 60s Volga below.  The cream-colored sedan above and the red & blue wagon next to it are also Volgas (think police or security services); to the right of the wagon are two Pobedas (Pobeda means victory in Russian), made by GAZ, the makers of the Volga, from 1946-'58.

Mostly, though, it's a lineup of items like this Chaika four-door convertible. The Chaika, like the even bigger Zis and Zil which carried Soviet leaders from the mid-40s into the 80s, was originally based on the American Packard (this looks like a '56), but by the early 60s the template had shifted to Cadillac. The big, anonymous parade float to the left of the Chaika is a Zil...

Things didn't end well for Yanukovych.  Accused of fraud during a runoff election in 2004 which led to widespread protests and the Orange Revolution of that year, he was elected president in 2010, but driven into exile in Russia after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, leaving behind this late-Thirties DKW, an ancestor of the Audi, along with other loot on display in his palace, which has become a public museum.  Ukrainian courts eventually convicted him of treason in absentia.

We'll close with another image from the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, a city which was, until a recent attack on an air base, a place regarded as relatively safe.  Architects in the USA tend to get upset when historic buildings are demolished without due process, but another level of outrage is triggered when buildings sheltering people from an unprovoked war on their country are brought down with rocket attacks.  Targets of recent attacks have included a maternity clinic, a historic theater sheltering hundreds, and a building clearly marked "CHILDREN"...in Russian. 

 

Photo Credits:  

All photos were kindly provided, with some history notes, by Keith Carlson. 

*Footnote:  
The architecture website archinect.com has provided excellent coverage of modern and historic architecture in Ukraine, and also on the latest efforts by Ukrainians to save their neighbors and their built environment while under aerial bombardment.  The easiest way to read these is to start with the March 14 post by Josh Niland.  Links don't always work on this blog, but here's a link anyway...

https://archinect.com/news/tag/17154/ukraine

Roadside Attraction: Arcosanti---Shadows Over Utopia

We interrupt our regularly scheduled, nonessential programming about mid-century architecture and old cars to mention that World Central Kitchen is now serving refugees from the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. We've also heard good things about the International Rescue Committee doing a similar job; both organizations have accepted our humble donations...

When architect Paolo Soleri launched construction of Arcosanti, his model city in the Arizona desert back in 1970, the idea was to offer a self-sufficient, environmentally-sound alternative to suburban sprawl.  At the core of Soleri's arcology (a fusion of architecture and ecology) were the ideas of high density and megastructure, where a city could be housed in a single building.  The city-in-building concept had gotten a boost from Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago in the early Sixties, with offices, stores, restaurants, marina, dwellings and a movie theater in a riverfront high-rise complex that would, if you lived and worked there, allow you to mostly ignore the weather outside. The megastructure idea became fashionable in this era, with architecture magazines giving lots of space to the unbuilt urban proposals of London's Archigram group and the Japanese Metabolist movement.  Soleri's goal for Arcosanti, situated about 70 miles north of Phoenix, was to house as many as 5,000 people in a single structure, and to build towards a density exceeding that of the world's most densely-populated cities.  The master plan model above shows how this megastructure was intended to look. The dark gray structures arrayed along the base of the looming light gray megastructure shows what has actually been constructed.

When I visited Arcosanti on Memorial Day weekend just over a decade ago, it looked much like the photo above, with construction proceeding at a very slow pace, and a few dozen people living and working either on construction or in the casting of bronze bells, the business Soleri had selected as a fund-raising mechanism for his dream project. Structures step down the hillside, with simple guest rooms at the base.  Heroic vaults and a half-dome had been built in concrete...

        

Close to the top of the incline, above the guest rooms and utilitarian spaces, the Arcosanti team had built the vaults shown above, along with rectilinear structures containing Soleri's design studio, a half dome known as the Arcosanti Apse to shelter the foundry for casting the bells, a dining hall, and guest apartments with commanding views of the landscape.  There was also a semicircular amphitheater space...

                        

Working and dwelling spaces with large circular openings in concrete are deployed in an arc around the steps of this amphitheater. The steel reinforcing projecting from the cantilevered concrete beams hints at an intended link to planned additions, but the pace of construction would seem to position any completion date deep into the future. What happened to this idea of an experimental city, and how did it get delayed, if not derailed altogether?  We need to go back over a hundred years...

Born in Turin, Italy in 1919, Paolo Soleri was awarded a masters degree in architecture from the Turin Polytechnic in 1946 and journeyed to the US in December of that year. Once there, he spent eighteen months studying under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West* as well as at Taliesin in Spring Green. The Taliesin West experience influenced Soleri in his selection of a location for his urban experiment, and probably in his approach to education; Soleri taught architecture at Arizona State University. His approach to visual form, however, may owe as much to Italian modernism as what he learned (or taught) in Arizona. There is the romantic use of classical forms (those vaults, that dome) for their own sake…after all, there's nothing in the nature of a dome that makes it a good foundry space.  And these cubes, semicircles and circles are deployed at Arcosanti without regard to patterns of sun or shade, in a way that Italian Futurists might have deployed them in the decade before Soleri was born.

As San Francisco Mark English pointed out in his perceptive analysis*, many of the failings of Arcosanti proceed from the original one: failure to select the right site.  Though Arcosanti was intended to be self-sufficient, it sits above a seasonal creek that, even before the present mega-drought, was dry half the year, so no food is grown on site.  Add to that the fact that Soleri did not seek out land forms which might provide natural shade, unlike, for example, the native tribes who built their houses into cliffs above arable land.  The buildings face south across the big ravine, with few integrated or applied sun-shading devices.  Failure to use native, drought-tolerant plants in the landscape design was another example of inattention to the specifics of site.  

A few years after Soleri died at age 93, his daughter Daniela published an account of his abusive behavior as a parent, which included sexual abuse, and of his toxic relationships to women working at Arcosanti.  She noted that her complaints during her adolescence were ignored by adults working there. Somehow it is less shocking than it should be that an architect with visions of remaking cities according to his vision should fail so spectacularly to get his own house in order.  It seems to fit a pattern of mankind in general, and of men specifically, that we often turn our attention to remaking the world before even attempting the task of remaking ourselves...

So the stillborn city at Arcosanti may have been born of a kind of hubris, which led to choosing the wrong place to demonstrate an idea, and then choosing the wrong forms and details to make the idea work, all the while ignoring a much more immediate problem: recognizing the rights of everyone, including women and children, on the way to this imagined utopia, still shimmering like a mirage in the desert heat...

Errata:   Apologies to anyone who tried to read the original version of this post, which was riddled with typos, especially in the last paragraph...perhaps the result of inadequate caffeine or caffeine substitute (i.e. sleep).  If readers had actually paid for this work, we'd be offering a refund...

*Footnote:  For a more detailed critique of the site design, architectural form and landscape at Arcosanti, we recommend the post by San Francisco architect Mark English at thearchitectstake.com.  It's entitled "Arcosanti Design Critique." For a visual survey of another Arizona project by a utopian architect, you might want to check out "Roadside Attraction: Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, and the Taliesin Vehicle Fleet", posted here on January 22, 2022.  We surveyed other proposals for utopian cities in "Cities Under Glass: the Dream of Domed Cities" on March 18, 2018.

Monochrome Photo Credit (master plan model):  archdaily.com

Color Photo Credits:  

Second from top (overall view):  Wikimedia

All other color photos:  The author.