I started at Art Center College in the fall of 1967, when the psychedelic era and flower power were in full bloom (heh-heh). I was 21, and it was an exciting time to be in Los Angeles. Art Center required an extreme level of discipline, so any involvement in the general activities of the day, including hair length and dress, was not an option. As a Transportation Design major, our first Transportation class began in the second semester. Some of the students already had professional design experience, and were attending to get a formal graduate degree for better career opportunities. Don Wyatt was in our class, and had been a Tech Designer at General Motors Design Staff. He was familiar with the sketch and design techniques in use by GM designers, and he could hold his own with many of them. I was “blown away” by his technique skills at Art Center, as he exhibited his work for critique every week in each class. Gaylord Eckles was a Product Design major from San Francisco, and he was an incredible talent. From the simplest sketch to the most detailed design models, his work was truly exquisite and always delightful. Eckles later became an award-winning instructor at Art Center, and I am sure he was a tremendous inspiration to many fortunate enough to have had the benefit of his knowledge and design wisdom.

Our instructor for the first Transportation Design class was Hugh Jorgensen (click here to read an interview with Hugh Jorgensen). In my opinion, he was the best possible choice for our introduction to the very challenging and competitive world of professional automotive design. Jorgensen was always optimistic, motivational,positive and supportive in his critique of our work. He was never negative or derogatory, and he inspired much-needed confidence.

For our second Transportation Design class in third semester, our instructor was Strother MacMinn. ”Mac” was a legend at Art Center and in automotive design centers and related publications all over the world. He has had more influence on the careers of more automotive designers than any other single individual—ever. Unlike Hugh Jorgensen, Mac could be brutal and scathing in his student critiques. It was high praise, indeed, to receive any compliment from Mac!

Fifth semester was the beginning of Advanced Transportation Design classes for two days each week, and Mac was the instructor. For this semester, we were required to first design and then construct one-fifth scale, high-density urethane foam models of our final selected sketch theme directions. Mac normally was the instructor for the two day sixth semester Trans classes. Two new instructors were brought in for our sixth semester, because Mac was taking a sabbatical in Detroit during this time in 1969. The two instructors were Harry Bradley for one day and renowned Shelby designer Pete Brock for the second day! Harry and Pete were only scheduled to teach this one semester, but Harry Bradley stayed on for many years after. What a fantastic experience having Bradley and Brock as our sixth semester Advanced Transportation Design instructors.

General Motors, Ford, and sometimes Chrysler would come out to Art Center every other semester to assign a design project for which they would provide a final critique for each Trans students presentation. I was honored to participate in a General Motors Design Seminar for my seventh semester. The GM design team was represented by the legendary Dave Holls. Our final presentation included finished renderings, design development sketches, and a package component layout illustration. Also included was a space buck skeleton framework in scale to accurately illustrate in three-dimensional form the placement of seating and drivetrain components within equally spaced sections, indicating the outer body shell surface contours. Complimenting the space buck was a detailed clay model.

Our GM design assignment was the end of an era, as it turned out. We were to design a close-coupled front wheel drive 455 V8 personal luxury coupe for the mid-seventies. I selected Buick for my proposal, and created the “Centuro” name as a contemporary variation of Buick’s famous Century and Centurion nameplates. My design theme incorporated “applied form” raised rib forms over the front wheel openings and “sub windows”. Sub windows were smaller, fixed window areas that later became more well known as opera windows, as seen on the 1971 Cadillac Eldorado. The Centuro also included alloy wheels and a reverse “Z” line as a variation of Buick’s familiar “Sweepspear” on the body side with urethane body color front and rear bumper surfaces as pioneered by Pontiac’s GTO in 1968.

Send Dean’s Garage your interesting, scary, awe-inspiring, eye-opening, and funny stories from design school!

Some examples of Dick Nesbitt’s student work from Art Center.

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The Art Center Bandsaw.

Late nighters or all nighters were the norm. It didn’t start out that way. When the semester first starts, you promise yourself that you’ll work on the class assignment that night. But after a couple of weeks you find yourself scrambling to get tomorrow’s assignment done. I fell asleep briefly standing up during a critique once. But that is another story.

One day I was in the shop waiting for some tool at the tool crib window. Near where I standing was a pretty big band saw. Pushing something that needed to be shorter through the blade was a student with that glazed over “I’ve been up a few nights” look. The thing he was pushing was a chunk of hard wood with the table tilted about 30 degrees, so it was feeding fairly slowly. The student was concentrating hard on what he was doing. In his state of mind dealing with several factors at once was probably not much of an option. Not having any other distraction, I watched the action at the band saw. I soon noticed that the student’s thumb was strategically positioned to hold the wood to give the most stability to the endeavor. I also noticed that if he maintained that grip, both his thumb as well as the wood would soon be shorter.

The feeding was going slowly enough that I could wait and see if he moved his thumb. But he kept pushing—past the point where I would have adjusted my grip on the board as to not whack off any appendages. Still, there was still time for him to act. Not a lot of time mind you, but some. But he kept pushing, way past my comfort level, and his thumb moved precariously close to the blade. It wouldn’t do to watch him cut his thumb off. I left my place at the tool crib window, stepped over and grabbed the student’s arm.

“Hey! Be careful. You’re going to cut your thumb off!

His response? “What? Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”

—Gary Smith

Style Conscious: The Art Center College of Design at 70

by Chris Poole

Source: Collectible Automobile magazine, August 2000, courtesy of Forgotten Fiberglass

Subtitle: America’s premier design school remains the world’s most renowned, alma mater to more star auto designers than any other single institution. Here’s a look at the unique college where design is both art and science-and dreaming is always part of the curriculum.

It’s true what they say: Experience is usually the best teacher, and practice tends to make one proficient. For 70 years, there’s been no better place for would-be car designers to get healthy helpings of experience and practice than the Art Center College of Design (ACCD) in Pasadena, California.

There’s certainly no better school for an aspiring designer to have on a resume. It’s estimated that Art Center graduates account for at least 50 percent of all the designers who’ve ever worked in Detroit and there have been dozens more at companies from Audi to Volvo. Is it any wonder, then, that Art Center alumni have popped up so often in Collectible Automobile—personality profiles over the years?

In 1946, Art Center SchooI, as it was then named, moved from its or original First Street campus in downtown Los Angeles to this large, rather palatial-looking facility on Third Street to accommodate a burgeoning postwar student body. It would remain the School’s home until 1975.

Still, it’s the glamorous “Trans Design” program that continues to give Art Center much of its high public visibility and a formidable reputation that has automakers scrambling over each other to hire its graduates year after year. Of course, the graduates themselves have had much to do with that, and their achievements testify as much to the quality of their education as to their personal abilities and talent.

George Jergenson (left) was co-founder of the Industrial Design Department and its chairman through 1969. He was also an active instructor, as seen in this early-Fifties photo.

But a long procession of illustrious alumni doesn’t fully explain Art Centers rise to become what Fortune magazine once termed “the most important autodesign school in the U.S.” There is, for one thing, the excellence of its teaching, long acknowledged by corporate employers and based on the two simple precepts mentioned at the start of this article. Perhaps more important, Art Center was, for many years, the only auto-design school in the U.S. Indeed, it was preparing students for careers in industrial and commercial design almost before the professions were born.

Design executives from major automakers remain frequest visitors to Art Center, critiquing studen projects, doing a bit of lecturing perhaps, and scouting out possible hires. GM design chief Bill Mitchell made the trip frequently over the years. Here he explains the fine points of surface development with the aid of a 1960 Buick. (No doubt he is explaining that GM prides itself on the fact that every square inch has to have an arbitrary surface change.)

Determined to close these gaps, Adams persuaded a group of friends and colleagues to help fund and set up a school taught by working design professionals. Thus was founded the Art Center School in 1930, with Adams as president and director, plus a handful of instructors working in their spare time out of several small studios on Seventh Street in downtown Los Angeles.

A Jetsons-like personal helicopter backdrops a mid-Sixties chat between (from left) Chuck Jordan, Jergenson, Mitchell, and Stother MacMinn.

With the outbreak of World War II, Art Center’s ability to train proficient technical illustrators attracted the attention of Southern California’s aircraft industry. The late Strother MacMinn (CA, June 1994), an ACCD faculty member for 50 years, was then working for the prestigious Henry Dreyfuss firm. As he told Collectible Automobile, companies like Lockheed and Douglas “were hiring [relatively) unskilled people . . . to read blueprints and put things together. That is pretty impossible. But if you can give them an 'exploded' view in a perspective, they can see how the assembly works and it's much quicker. So that efficiency became an essential part of the war effort."

Afterward, as MacMinn told us, "Adams contacted two graduates, George A. Jergenson and John D. Coleman, who were working in the Detroit area, [and) persuaded them to come back out to California and reconstruct the Industrial Design Department. They essentially built the curriculum schedule that exists today based on Adams' idea of having one class that runs all day, like a professional experience. And then tile next day it's another class. and so on."

Basic illustration is part of the early semesters core curriculum for all Art Center students. The Third Street campus and a '71 De Tomaso Pantera made absorbing subjects for this group. (Gosh, didn't anybody bring a digital camera?)

One of Art Center's most remarkable facets is long-lived leadership in the face of vast social and technological change. Adams didn't step down until 1963, and his successor, alumnus Don Kubly, carried on through 1985. It was under Kubly that the school changed its name to Art Center College of Design in 1973, then moved to its present campus three years later: a sleek 166,000-square-foot building with complete workshop and studio facilities nestled on 175 acres in the hills above Pasadena's Rose Bowl. David R. Brown took over upon Kubly's retirement, then retired himself in late 1999. His successor, Richard Koshalek, a former director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, is thus only the fourth president in Art Center's 70-year history.

Jergenson (right) reviews a scale model with student and instructor, circa 1965. (The instructor was Joe Thompson, a wonderful, gentle scupltor who got the most from his students with encouragement and expert guidance from years of professional experience. I remember going over to his apartment once to help him with some issue regarding his '69 Camaro. The man on the far left was the shop instructor, Joe something.)

Another Art Center constant has been its creatively competitive and physically taxing curricula. Per Adams' precepts, students spend an entire day in one studio course—five different classes per week—ranging from basic illustration and model making in the first and second terms to senior-student projects sponsored by major corporations. But that's not all. Evenings (and sometimes Saturday mornings) are devoted to required academic courses in the humanities, social and behavior sciences, natural sciences, art history, and, for "Trans Design" majors, studies ranging from human factors to basic automotive engineering. One wonders when students find time to sleep.

A seating buck for a mid-Sixites project suggests rear-engine, forward controls much on the student's minds. (Obviously this was before the government got involved with car design.)

With that in mind, day-to-day instruction strives for complete realism, nail-biting stress included. "We teach in a competitive fashion because that's the way Art Center has always been," says Ron Hill. "You put your design up on the board for your final critique and you want to outshine everybody. That intensity is what's really important. The students learn from each other, the self-induced competition. Extremely competitive, but extremely good in terms of a disciplined learning experience."

Strother MacMinn talks form and function in the early Sixties with future Pontiac Designer Terry Hinline (left) (that's Terry Hinline?) and another student. (Perhaps Strother is talking about aerodynamics, since this shot is taken in a wind tunnel.)

Role models for those qualit es are as close as Art Center ‘s teaching professionals. As Strother MacMinn once observed: “When [the instructors] come in and talk about the things they were doing yesterday at their business activity, it enhances the students’ attitudes no end. They cherish those moments of sharing, because then they feel they’re sort of part of it.”

Bill Mitchell holds forth on one of his “pets,” the 1960 Mako Shark Corvette.

With all this, it’s no surprise that so many Art Center grads end up designing the cars that end up in the worlds driveways. ” In the mid Fifties,” Hill recalls, “there was one opportunity, and that was Detroit. Now there are multiple opportunities: the burgeoning industry in Southeast Asia, Latin America, certainly Europe.” Lately, there’s also that perennial bellweather of automotive trends, Southern California, which is now home to satellite design operations established by most all of the world’s leading manufacturers. Significantly, ACCD’s MacMinn was a key advisor when the first of these outposts, Toyota’s Calty Design Research, was set up in 1976.

Model building has always been a must skill for Art Center students, especially Trans Design majors, and facilities have improved tremendously since the Fifties. (I guess so. I have stories.)

But can such creativity be taught, even at Art Center? “I believe you can darn near train anybody to paint, and render, and draw well,” says Hill. “We have a very good program for doing that. But what if they don’t have anything to say? What we’re trying to do is to get students to put their creativity out in front, to make that known. I think it can be nurtured. I think it can be encouraged. I’m not sure that it can be taught. I’m not sure it can’t. My suspicion is, if it can, it’s very difficult.”

Gordon Buerhig (center) and his Cord 812 Sportsman convertible pose with Jorgenson and Carroll Shelby’s iconic Cobra Daytona coupe, circa 1970. (There was a student parking lot, but students also parked on the street. I remember seeing some students new silver Rolls Royce Corniche convertible with a red interior, top down, parked all day on the street. Not everybody was struggling to pay the bills.)

By nurturing such talent for seven decades, Art Center has arguably done more than any other institution to legitimize the design disciplines, which it does by insuring that graduates have what Bradley calls “the level of superiority and expertise the industry is looking for.” In this respect, imitation has been the sincerest form of tribute. The Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, the Royal College of Art in London, and many universities have long offered programs modeled closely on Art Center’s.

Recent student work is always on view in the lobby of today’s Pasedena campus. This future-Camaro proposal dates from the mid-Eighties.

(Left) Late semester students get little rest trying to get their sponsored projects done. (Right) Veteran Chrysler designer Neil Walling leads a “crit” at the Pasadena campus in the early Nineties. Critiques expose students to the competitive world of a working designer. (That may be Neil Walling, but standing to his right is Geza Loczi.)

Stother MacMinn (left) looks on as Bill Mitchell comments on a student project in the Sixties.

Harry Bradley agrees, but then adds, “It’s a thrill to work for the best. What else can I say?”

Sliding doors—one students answer.

Instructor Harry Bradley helping a student with his model.

Manufacturers often sponsor Art Center projects to get a fresh perspective on their current products and how younger minds see them evolving. Here, Chrysler’s Tom Gale brainstorms future minivans with students assigned to come up with the next generation ideas.

Another frequently visiting executive was Gene Bordinat, longtime Ford Design Chief.

You might not think so from this crowded scene, by Art Center has always been a small institution, with many more applicants than it can handle, which makes for an elite, highly motivated student body (take note, clients and potential employers!). This Pasedana workroom is a far cry from the facilities in the College’s early days.

Director of Admissions
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, CA 91103
(626) 396-2300
Website: www.artcenter.edu

Alumni: Email photos from your time and experience at Art Center or any other design school for a future post!

This first post features Harry’s illustration work scanned from various publications from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. During that time sneak previews of the new models sold magazines, and Harry was hired to illustrate new models. His illustration styles varied considerably over time, and often in one publication Harry would have several different styles. His illustrations were fun to look at, and at times he played with the viewer with backgrounds, reflections, and perspective. When I look back at my artwork from my early days at GM, it is apparent that Harry’s style influenced my own.

Part Two will feature his more recent work including many hot rod and design illustrations.

There are several tributes to Harry Bradley online, including: The Andrew Johnson Gallery, and Rik Hoving’s online photo archive.

Biography

Harry Bentley Bradley was born in 1936 in Waban, Massachusetts. He began to draw early, and nurtured his artistic talent through youth classes at the Museum of Fine Arts. “What I recall most about those classes was the magic. My whole world opened up.” During the summer of 1949, fourteen year old Harry contracted Polio and was soon paralyzed from the waist down. Harry was treated at the Boston’s Children’s Hospital for seven months. He passed the time with drawing. Nurses would place his wheel chair by a window overlooking the street so he could sketch automobiles. For the first few months at home he used a wheelchair of which he was very proud. He added lots of decorations: mirrors with reflectors, squeeze-bulb horns, handgrips with red, white and blue vinyl streamers, and a fox tail hanging at the rear. It was his first customized vehicle! After learning to live with leg braces, Harry went on to finish grade school and became further entrenched into the car culture of the early 1950′s.

Harry got into the early fifties Chevys after borrowing an all-black 1950 Chevrolet Bel Air from the guy who was dating his sister. He started to make sketches and designs, making plans for his own car. After a couple of years he wrangled a cherry red 1951 Chevrolet Bel Air from his parents. This happened in 1954. The Chevy had been the milkman’s car. When he got it, Harry promised his parents that he wouldn’t touch the car, never. But it was too late; his parents didn’t have a chance against the inspiration Harry had gotten from people like PininFarina, Harley Earl, Joe Bailon and the Barris Brothers. The Chevrolet is better known as the La Jolla.

Harry Bradley’s later work will be the subject of Part Two.

Harry attended the College of Wooster for a liberal arts education at the urging of his parents but his real goal was a career in automobile design. He wrote to General Motors asking about job opportunities and their response suggested the industrial design program at Pratt Institute. While attending the design program, Harry launched his own business as a custom design consultant and began to contribute regularly to various automotive publications such as Rodding and Re-styling, Customs Illustrated and Rod & Custom.

Harry was recruited by General Motors during his last semester at Pratt and moved to Detroit in July, 1962. It was against General Motors company policy to publish designs for Hot Rod and Custom Magazines while working for General Motors, so Harry continued to publish his design under the false name Mark Fadner. Within weeks of his arrival at GM Design Staff, Harry and the Alexander Brothers had forged a relationship that would result in more than 10 Bradley-designed custom cars over the next eight years. While working for the Cadillac design studio, Harry designed the Alexa, a 1964 Ford fastback Galaxie for the Alexander Brothers. The car was part of the Ford Custom Caravan, so needless to say, working for Ford’s interest while working for General Motors would have threatened Harry’s job, so Mike and Larry Alexander credited Harry as Designer X. The threat wasn’t much of a deterrent; Bradley and the brothers designed and built several more Caravan cars.

Harry worked for GM for four years. During his time there he worked for a number of studios. Harry took advantage of GM’s fellowship study program for a Masters degree at Stanford University. In 1964, while studying in California Harry designed the Dodge Deora for the Alexander Broethers.

In the spring of 1966 Harry was recruited by the Mattel Corporation. Mattel wanted to hire a designer from one of Detroit’s “Big 3″ to create the look of their new Hot Wheels die-cast cars, so Elliot Handler of Mattel sent Fred Adickes to Detroit to find what they were looking for. Adickes placed an ad in the local Detroit newspaper. The response was surprisingly low, but Adickes returned with Harry Bradley. Harry saw the job at Mattel as a great opportunity to return to California. With Mattel paying the gas money Harry drove his 1964 Chevrolet El Camino to California. Bradley’s mix of hot rod and mainstream car design proved the perfect combination. The original line had 16 models in bright candy colors with carburetor stacks, mag wheels, chopped roofs and red line tires. The cars were released in 1968 and all of the cars were designed by Harry Bentley Bradley with the exception of the Custom Volkswagen which was designed by Ira Gilford.

As it turned out, the Hot Wheels brand was a staggering success! Unfortunately, Harry Bentley Bradley didn’t think that would be the case and had quit Mattel in 1969. When the company asked him back, he recommended a good friend, Ira Gilford. Gilford, who just had just left Chrysler, quickly accepted the job of designing the next Hot Wheels models. Harry resigned to start his own design firm and began work on a variety of projects. Harry designed everything from plastic model kits to full size hot rods and custom cars. Source: Kustomrama.

1969 Cars Motorcade

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1973 Motor Trend’s New Cars

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1979 New Car Previews

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1980 Corvettes of the Future

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1982 World Car Previews

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This is a Geza Loczi vellum sketch from the early ’70s.

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