Patrick Le Quément: A legend on the future

An editorial explanation

A few days ago we asked a selection of eminent designers and commentators to rank a series of current trends for a piece in our annual yearbook, Car Design Review (to be launched at the Geneva show in March).

Most sent back swift, thoughtful but brief replies, befitting their status as super-busy design directors. Patrick Le Quément, however, took the time to write at length about three of the trends we zeroed in on. And as you’d expect from one of the most adventurous, unique and intelligent of designers, it was too good not to share.

Le Quément himself has been out of the car industry for a few years now, though is still busy designing yachts and running a design school, among many other things. Here’s an excellent overview of his career by fellow designer Peter Stevens, and there’s also a rather good video here which accompanied one of his many awards. But we’ll let him introduce himself, as he charmingly did in his email to us.

I left the auto industry 10 years ago and, apart from my regular judging at Villa D’Este and consulting on the subject of management with the heads of Chinese design centres, I have remained away from what has been a life’s passion.

When I left Renault I decided that I was not going to retire but become once again a simple designer practicing in a field I knew nothing about; that was important for me as it was the challenge that I searched for above all. Naval design it was to be, and I entered this field purely by coincidence and today, as I enter my tenth year as the sailboat designer for the brands Lagoon, Excess, Outremer and Gunboat (all catamarans) I now can boast 973 boats sailing the seas across the world that bear my design signature.

I’ve also co-founded an international design school in Nice which is now in its fifth year of existence; its name is The Sustainable Design School.

And then, the final joy of my existence (apart from family and my home in Cassis in the south of France)… I’ve written a book which will be launched in early September this year by Merrell Publishers. Its title is Design: Between the Lines.

I hope you may be able to use my little literary extravaganza; I’ve tackled 3 themes:

Interiors as Lounge Spaces

That 1998 Renault Espace advertisement

‘Every time I hear Wagner I want to invade Poland’ – this quote from Woody Allen came to my mind when I read the title of this topic. As far as I am concerned, every time I hear of interiors as lounge spaces it makes me think of revolution. What ever happened to that promise of miniaturisation which dominated the creative minds of those active in the late ’90s and early ’90s? Whereas our mobile telephones have gone all the way from the size of a building brick in the late ’80s, to what sometimes appears to be just ever slightly too small a size to operate, the reverse has happened in our car interiors. They’ve been invaded by riotous gizmos, overwhelming consoles, overbearing instrument panels equipped with over-the-top screens, filled with over-generous information resulting in undersized space. Our car interiors are so full of so many things that you almost feel like asking permission before getting in.

Remember that advertisement for the fourth generation Renault Espace (by the way, Espace is the French word for space): “Et si le vrai luxe c’était l’Espace?” or, translated into English: “What if space was the real luxury?” The word lounge immediately makes me think of a spacious environment and decidedly not being enclosed like a slice of cold meat between two overstuffed buns, be they in leather, velour or ingratiating fabric. If we want space we, engineers and designers, must fight for it.

Now of course we could allow ourselves to be carried along with the comfortable force of the tide, and talk about interiors as a lounge, meaning a plump interior riddled with cup holders, where a fine bottle of Cristal Brut Millésimé Champagne is displayed for the purpose of communicating to the fatigued brain that we have entered the world of luxury. Myself, I would rather we tore up the design brief and rewrote it in order to give it some meaning. Let us work to reduce the size of that invading technology by replacing it with better, more clever, more controlled technology which gives us back our space.

And whilst we are at it, let’s always keep in mind that, contrary to buildings where you can move within them, cars do the moving but we don’t. And so: let’s not forget that comfort is not just a question of providing a half hour’s gratification, but rather we must offer it for hours on end, which entails providing intelligent seats that allow passengers to find lasting comfort by adjusting their posture to optimise blood flow. Then again, can we not begin to provide welcoming comfort, rather than brochure comfort, to our door panels, which become tantamount to planned cruelty on a long journey?

Dramatic Surfacing

Chris Bangle’s flame-surfaced BMW X-Coupé

Predicting the future is said to be a risky game but, I would add that even if it’s possible to imagine it from a purely conceptual standpoint, it’s just impossible when it comes to style. Take the example of the greatest designer of all times, Leonardo da Vinci, who several centuries ahead of his time dreamed up a large number of inventions like the submarine, the helicopter or the tank. If one is impressed by the remarkable visons of our ultimate Renaissance man, the style of his creations remain impregnated by the time he lived in, namely the 15th and 16th centuries. It’s all to do with technical evolution as well as the zeitgeist.

But then, the timeframe we are referring to is not beyond the normal time span of a typical product development time for an automobile, and so the pointers are all around us to pluck. There was for a long time a palette of three different, off-the-shelf, formal treatments, namely: soft, hard and in between, a recipe not unlike boiling an egg. Then came Chris Bangle who upturned the table with his flame surfacing which was immediately condemned by the design community, outraged to have been overtaken on the wrong side. Quickly thereafter, flame surfacing appeared here, there and everywhere, often displaying a lack of mastery which condemned the compositions to oblivion.

And so we came back to our three classical formal treatments which cohabited as, unlike in the ’80s, the Italian carrozzeria were no longer there to establish the trends for all to follow. Then of course, at the turn of the millenium, we went through the maturing of digital development which was not propitious to formal exploration. Currently a more healthy equilibrium has been reached between sculpting in front of a screen and sculpting with a clay tool in hand.

Today, if our designers manage to convince their ever-so-cautious management that tepid water is not the only alternative, we will enter a period where we close a chapter, and start a new book. It’s long overdue, as automotive design has gone through a somewhat monotonous period where emotion has taken a backseat, responding mostly to the challenge of creating yet another SUV…

The Rise of the SUV

The SUV: inescapable but nearly identical

SUVs are not unlike those grey squirrels that came from America which have, over the years, decimated our own smaller, but so much cuter European red squirrels. The question that one must ask ourselves is: does the world need SUVs? Or, to put it in another way: does the world need only SUVs?

It’s difficult to rationalise the phenomena as clearly SUVs are heavier and more expensive than a traditionally packaged automobile, and their only merit is a higher than average altitude favouring ingress and egress, as long as the height is not of the ‘climbing the northern side of the Eiger’ type. Of course better all-round vision, as well as the social acceptance of being like everyone else, is yet another reason to buy one.

But there again, if the majority of road traffic were to succumb to this genocide we would cancel the obvious advantage of dominant forward vision and be left with the unfavourable effects of overweight, including its negative impact on the environment. Apart from the obvious and real issues related to climate change, we should ask the question: do we really need such monsters to carry an average of 1.4 persons for micro journeys to the corner shop? There again, many unusual ideas have caught the world’s fancy, from hula hoops to roller skates, the main difference being that none were quite as distressingly negative for people’s health, not to mention the associated carbon footprint. I think SUVs should be made to display a sign on their shiny hoods: ‘My SUV is bad for your health’.

On a lighter side, no pun intended, SUVs are so decidedly marked by their uncompromising proportions that they allow relatively few differentiations possible between brands. We are now entering the fuzzy zone titled boredom. There is nothing more similar to a SUV than another SUV. Are we condemned to eat junk food, drive SUVs and wear torn jeans? What, all of us? Will we be put on trial in front of a politically correct jury if we decide to drive a Fiat Cinquecento or a Renault Alpine?

Vive la différence!

Patrick, now a successful catamaran designer too