The proceedings at Brandenburg Gate, Berlin to commemorate “Germany – Land of Ideas” drew in “The Automobile” a giant car sculpture and featured the staging of the next Audi TT Coupe for the first time.
Personally this event evokes the turnaround of perception of the automobile during the second half of the 1990s, educed more by auto design than auto technology. The Audi TT concept car in 1995 can be considered a design milestone with this regard. Since then Germany has provided a varied range of models and redefined the distinctive look of each make more actively than ever before through a visual master plan, branding each make with an inimitable appearance.
The comeback of the German car has been influenced largely by design be it model strategy, value addition or engineering as revealed by the A class, Boxster, and the new beetle. But the most outstanding image alteration during this period was Audi's. The original TT can be credited in defining the Audi form language in its dawning years and has to be the most significant car designs of the last decade. Its styling is a defining moment in automotive design history for its novelty and daringness to depart from the principles laid by car styling text books of the time. The birth of the TT proved that the philosophy from the Bauhaus and Ulm school movements could indeed be incorporated into car design earlier deemed impossible and witnessed mostly in product design. That itself is an outstanding achievement leading Chief Designer Peter Schreyer to be merited with the German official distinction for design for his creation.
One cannot undermine the difficulty in distilling the simple design language of the TT’s characteristic rounded bodywork, absence of definite bumpers and clever application of bare aluminum, emblematic of a modernised industrialised world. Arguably the TT drove straight from the production line into the design museum. In the years to follow the TT's influence could be observed in design elements of cars that rolled out after her. In contemporary car design few cars possess such worldwide commendation or project an image that seems ahead of its time even a decade later!
Clear, unobtrusive elements define German Design and give it its excellent reputation; it works, is technically established and of high aesthetic quality. This is thanks to Bauhaus in the 1920's, and the Ulm School of Design in the 1950's and 60's, the formative institutions of modernism which involved a broad design of the product environment, considering product-people interface at a higher level to develop solutions for the socio-cultural changes in the industrial society. This sober form of German design is best exemplified by Dieter Ram's designs for Braun in the 1960's, shapes that respected basic geometry like circles, and rectangles. Schreyer’s Audi TT was a car which was fundamentally created from circular forms as if it was Bauhaus’s vision of the future.
Undoubtedly this clarity of German design has gone down well internationally, as displayed by a recent cult product, the Apple iPod. Designer Jonathan Ive’s form language is the modern incarnation of a Dieter Ram’s Braun product, with the pastel finish of the 60s yielding to the contemporary glossy finish. Which it seems is exactly what the New TT is set to do by retaining its predecessor’s motifs of circles and domes but made glossier in its dynamic stance with the tension in its panels.
Today Audi is specifically German in that like BMW or Mercedes it is a brand so strong that it shapes its own form. And the TT continues to play its role as the corporate form.