Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Today I’m talking about the youngest….Formula 1 champion, Lewis Hamilton and sharing with you some of  my favorite car designs over the last 50 years in F1 racing.  What’s the relavance?  I’ll get to that.

This past Sunday, Lewis Hamilton became the F1 champ passing Timo Glock in the last corner on the last lap of the last race of the season.  For less than 30 seconds, race winner Felipe Massa of Ferrari was the champ…until that last corner.  Lewis was crowned champion by 1 point.  Wow.

Lewis Hamilton, 2008 F1 Champ

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Once upon a time, December 1980 to be exact, Italian architect-designer Ettore Sottsass had a little party to celebrate his plan to produce a new line of furniture.  He invited several young design collaborators.  A record was playing: Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again).”  When the vinyl platter kept catching on the word “Memphis,” a new design movement was christened.  What punk was to music, Memphis was to design.

Sottsass and the members of the collective, including young architect Michele De Lucchi, broke through the “tyranny” of modernist taste by making furniture made from leopard print plastic laminate, celluloids, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals, jazzed up with spangles, glitter, and crazy color combos. Read the rest of this entry »