Perhaps Richard Langworth’s tendency toward purple prose in this profile of Brooks Stevens in SIA #71, October 1982, is appropriate, given the picture he paints of the legendary designer: cordial, well-mannered, even elegant. The profile is no biography or compendium of Stevens’s designs (for that, turn to Glenn Adamson’s book, “Industrial Strength Design“), rather a […]

The final few years at Studebaker are fairly fascinating, considering everything the company was doing to continue building cars. There was not only the Avanti, but also the final developments of the Studebaker V-8 engine (R1 through R5) and, before the last gasp of Chevrolet-engined cars from 1965-1966, there was the attempt to turn the […]

Pretty much all we ever see anymore of L’Universelle, the GM concept truck of 1955, is the same color photograph and the same brief one-paragraph description, usually contained within broader articles about GM show cars. We almost never see any in-depth treatment of L’Universelle, establishing the concepts behind it and the parties involved in its […]