When Ford presented the successor to the Escort in 1999, the press and the public opened their mouths in amazement and admiration. The Ford Focus with its New Edge design looked revolutionary. A combination of sharp angles, clean lines and apparently flat surfaces determined the design of this new C-segmenter. The world had never seen anything like it. Or is it? Well, there were predecessors. For example, the cars from the early 80s with their characteristic sharp corners and clean lines: the Citroën BX, Mercedes-Benz 190, Volvo 760, Talbot Tagora … But the history goes back further. To 1955 to be precise, when a car appeared for the first time that seemed to have been designed with a ruler. The ruler of Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina.
When the pontoon shape made its appearance in the late 1940s, it was a revolution in car design. No more loose fenders, the different parts of the body were fused together into one whole. Bodywork became smooth and sleek, with convex shapes and rounded corners, you can see this for example in the Mercedes models of the early 50s, the Ford Custom of 1949 and the Peugeot 403. But that style of warm, round and convex shapes was changed overnight by the design studio of Batista ‘Pinin’ Farina, with the study model Lancia Florida. A total of four were built: a two-door copy and three variants of a four-door version, they appeared in 1955 at the motor shows of Turin and Paris, among others.
Lancia Florida
These study models were built on the technique of the Lancia Aurelia, but the round shapes of that model had made way for clean lines, straight surfaces and sharp angles on the Florida. Most striking was the sharp crease along the entire length of the body, just above the wheel cutouts. Also, this model had small fins next to the boot lid. Pininfarina hadn’t come up with that themselves, the Americans had already put the first fins on the back of the Cadillac models in 1953. But the Italians did give their own explanation to those fins. They were razor sharp, and taut.
Another typical style element of this car: the hood was now flat and flat. From beneath the windshield, the tops of the fenders ran forward like two horizontal, dead-straight tubes, each topped with a headlamp on the end. In between, the hood, like a flat, smooth slide, sloped down from the paravan and ended at the centerline of the headlights.
That the hood was lower than the fenders had never been shown before. Bonnets towered above the fenders on most cars, that was already the case with the Model T. And the first post-war pontoon cars, the Studebaker Champion and the 1949 Ford Custom, still had a slight bulge in the center of the hood, the last remnant of the old tall radiator. You can still see that bulge in the Volvo Amazon of 1956. But Pininfarina turned that all around. The hood went down and in the case of the Peugeot 404 that even meant tilting the four-cylinder inline engine a few degrees to fit underneath. Another style element that Pininfarina introduced here was the sharp fold that crowns the rear of the roof. The rear window was not flush with the body, but was protected by a ‘canopy’, the roof and C-pillars formed a protective fold around the rear window.
Lancia Flaminia
The ruler style that Pininfarina introduces hereby becomes iconic for the design of cars in the early 1960s. He uses the style to design (different) cars for various brands. For starters, he can convert the Lancia concept car into two production models, the Lancia Flaminia berlina and the Flaminia coupé, both of which appear on the market in 1957. Pininfarina then dives into the different variants of the Ferrari 250. The GT Berlinetta and the GT California Spider already have some of the characteristics of the original Florida, but the shapes of those two models are still bulbous.
The sides of the Austin A40 and the A55 Cambridge are also rounded, which Pininfarina signed for British Motor Corporation in the late 1950s. The English want to get rid of the bowler hat models from the late 1940s and seek advice in Italy. The cars Pininfarina designs for them will define BMC’s design for years to come. The first Austin A55 Cambridge and its counterpart, the Morris Oxford, have several stylistic features of the Florida, the wings at the back are even larger and go up at an angle towards the rear. In contrast, with this model there is no fold around the rear window. In 1961 the facelift of the Cambridge/Oxford appears, which also has a larger engine power and is therefore called A60. On this model, the wings at the back are somewhat flattened, the grille is larger. This model is becoming classic for two reasons: Pininfarina’s sharp styling and the untold number of brand variants produced by the BMC conglomerate.
Peugeot 404
Shortly after the British models, the four-seater Ferrari 250 GT/E appeared in 1960. Farina has incorporated almost all the characteristics of the Lancia from five years earlier: the tail fins, the straight shoulder line from front to back and the long, smooth bonnet descending to the front. But in the same year 1960, the new Peugeot 404 also appears and it is in this car that Pininfarina’s new ruler style comes to full fruition. The shoulder line is even straighter than on the Lancia and Ferrari, the tail fins are even sharper than on the Florida and Flaminia, the hood is even more than on the Austin Cambridge a very slippery slide from the windscreen to the front of the car. And the fold around the rear window, which was already so pronounced on the Lancia Florida, is even sharper, even deeper, even more beautiful on the 404.
This article originally appeared in AutoWeek Classics issue 11 of 2017.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl