The Forward Look

II

Beginning in 1950 Exner and his new design team Cliff Voss, Maury Baldwin, and consultant Paul Farago, set about establishing a relationship with Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin. Ghia had been around since 1915. Before the war they had designed and built a number of cars for the locals, Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo. The Allied bombing of Turin’s industrial centers didn’t do Ghia any favors; it was reduced to rubble in ‘43. The loss of all he had built proved to be too much for its founder Giacinto Ghia. During the factory’s reconstruction in 1944, Ghia collapsed and died of heart failure at the construction site. The company management was taken over by Giorgio Alberti and Felice Mario Boano. Boano had apprenticed with Stabilimenti Farina and then moved on to Pinin Farina. He then started his own scoccheria. A scoccheria gives an interesting insight into how the Italian coachbuilders operated. These companies are industrial carpenter operations that construct the wooden bucks over which the aluminum panels of the cars were hammered out. This method allows the Italians to produce a number of custom body designs, without incurring the cost of producing model specific body panel presses, like those used in Detroit for series production. This flexibility of creating prototypes of production car quality was to

provide Exner and his team with a platform for experimentation of shape and construction, while producing a number of their designs in limited series. Chrysler suddenly found itself in the promotionally valuable position of building limited production custom cars.
The first car the team built was the K-310. Built on Chrysler’s 125.5 wheelbase chassis, with the new Hemi V8, this car embodied Exner’s modern vision, combined with the elegance of Italian craftsmanship. One of the clear statements the design made was Exner’s philosophy that “The wheel is one of mankind's greatest inventions. Why attempt to hide it?"
Exner’s comment exhibited an observation, and criticism, of the direction car design had taken during the forties and early fifties. The advanced car designs of the late thirties began combining the fenders and the bodies in stylish sweeping art deco lines. As the war wound down, in the States body designers had become infatuated with airplane designs. The first step in this direction were not the fins and propeller noses so well remembered, but a design theme called monocoque. This had not to do with the sixties racing chassis designs that segued the tube frame, but rather a body that emulated the monolithic design of an airplane’s fuselage. These were large, rounded designs that sought to integrate the once individual elements of body design, fenders, grill, hood, into an airplane fuselage whole.