The Aesthete
I am never sure whether I am writing about the history of design or the history of taste. Sometimes they seem the same. But I am certain of an extraordinary simultaneity that unites the two: the end of the celebrity architect and the decline of the supercar. In Berlin, Jean Nouvel’s Galeries Lafayette is being demolished after fewer than 30 years. Nouvel? Black clad, good at poses, designer of buildings that are photogenic because they head-butt the public. Supercars? During the last accounting period, only 621 were sold in Britain compared with 1906 the previous year. Is this a cyclical blip, or long-term trend? In the colliding universes of architecture and automobiles, the stars are dying. Frank – ‘Bilbao’ – Gehry is in his nineties. Giugiaro and Gandini are long retired. Can anyone name credible successors?
Some us have been worried about what to do with our supercars now that we inhabit a world of continuous surveillance, practical blockade and ferocious legal remedies against speed, or even against driving itself. The answer, of course, is to take your supercar on a trailer to a concours d’elegance. Or, south of the Alps, a concorso d’eleganza.
Etymologically, ‘concours’ derives from the French for ‘gathering’. Thus a concours hippique was a horse show where animals and carriages might be displayed for discriminating assessment. Certainly, bureaucratising taste and establishing hierarchies appealed to the sense of order in the French mind and in 1896 there began an architectural competition called ‘Concours de façades de la Ville de Paris’.
It was a short step from a gathering of horses to a gathering of horsepower. A concours has become to driving what dressage is to rodeo. That’s to say, a highly cultivated form of display happily removed from dirty ‘reality’. Dressage horses do not, generally, leave steaming pyramids of manure. Concours cars do not attract parking tickets. Reality, of course, can be over-rated.
This year, for the first time, a concorso d’eleganza was held at the Medici-era Villa La Massa, just outside Florence. I was a judge. It was different to the older established gatherings in that it’s devoted to cars built after 1990, rather than the familiar classics. In this way the fair
