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
in 1942 by John Rienhardt. GM’s version was Frank Hershey’s Cadillac “C.O.”.
The monocoque was a design direction that passed quickly, taking some of the smaller
car companies with it. Ironically GM and Ford didn’t end up releasing any cars in this
style, though they had many designs on paper, because of the monumental task of
retooling their factory from war material production back over to car production. By the
time the factories were ready to go, they had designs that had moved beyond this short-
lived trend to more modern design. Many of these post war designs still echoed the thirties
statement of desire, ‘high, wide and handsome’. The American car during the late
twenties and thirties had indeed grown to a rather grand scale. The running board was no
design affectation, but a required step up into the interior. Even as the fenders were united
with the body on these post war designs, the cars, with rare exception, were grand in scale,
and their exterior metal work bore little relation to the mechanicals or interior beneath.
Fenders, like their predecessors, were often lower than the hood, which traditionally
housed the high and long straight-eight’s of the thirties. The high, long hood that had
become the subliminal message of power continued after the war. The Europeans took a
radically different, if obvious, approach, exemplified by Pinin Farina’s groundbreaking
Cisitalia 202 of 1949. Here was a design that addressed a subtler, if not more realistic,
approach to performance. Rather than proclaiming the power beneath the large and
ascendant hood, the entire front end was reduced for more effective penetration of the air
stream. Simple stated, the fenders were above the hood line. The entire design followed a
spare, muscular theme, than seemed to stretch the sheet metal closely over the
mechanicals. Coming out of the war, this signaled a dramatic design change, and one that
presaged post war car design as a whole.
With the K-310 Exner was exhibiting an appreciation of this new direction, and his deep
understanding of how skillfully it could be adapted to a large American chassis. When
compared to the current Chrysler products that shared this chassis, the K-310 was a
revelation. With the wheels as the design’s anchor, the fenders, both front and rear, rose in
a radius reflecting the perfectly circular wheel wells, and swept back in an contemporary
echo of the aerodynamic studies of Jean Andreau, that were so often the basis of the pre-
war French design movement. The volumes here are remarkable; the hood and the
fenders are on the same level. The rounded fluidity of the cockpit, with highly raked
windshield and fastback rear glass, swings down at its sides below the belt line, further
defining a low line, aero-swept body style. The trunk line descends below the rear fender
line, into an almost tear drop profile. To keep the sweep of the front fender line completely
clean, the headlights are place on the fascia, next to the grill.
