The 1960s were over and, as a new decade unfolded, concrete took over town and city, while social discontent replaced peace and love. Electronics crept into pop music against the wishes of prog rock, with soft, flowing, meandering themes now out; harder, faster, abrupt means were the way from now on. The classical forms of car design, meanwhile, developed to perfection barely 10 years ago, were suddenly passe.
Rejection of French curves was happening in styling studios across the automotive landscape, but the 1970s consummated this resolve. Research on either side of the Atlantic, however, shifts the timeline back further in terms of the wedge’s origins. Archivists, Guy Dirkin and Geoffrey Hacker, assert that the datum point began in California in 1966, when Art Center College of Design student, Ray…
