Original Message: ----------------- From: marcus.e.helman@gm.com Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 12:20:34 -0400 To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: [CR]Re:Mies
"Surely we are not going to get into a debate about whether curly lugs look better than simpler ones. While there may be a shred of objectivity in the Campagnolo-Simplex debate, there cannot be any in a discussion of what looks better. If ever a thing was a matter of personal esthetics, this is it. Personally I think both styles are appealing in their own way."
Marcus Helman Huntington Woods, MI
Well, hopefully we can debate it, just not argue it!
Of course, both styles have their advocates. My point was to put the choice in the context of what has long been a dilemma in the industrial age: should things somehow "look" like they work (form follows function) or should they have their own look derived from other elements or era. It's not a matter of right or wrong, but taste as you rightly say.
Then again, most modern industrial designers would be puzzled by an Ephgrave for example. A modern machine (and what designer would not worship the bicycle as the most simple and wonderous of machines?) with pre-Industrial Revolution lugwork and Gothic lettering but often contemporary paint finishes and of course modern, industrial designed components. It's not that each element alone is wrong or bad, it's the clashing of eras and concepts that puts me off somehow.
A Henry Dreyfuss (the American industrial designer who gave the us the Bell & Howell thermostat, most of our telephones, the Hoover etc.) would marvel at the elegant simplicity of the components on an 1950s Ephgrave, the alloy GB brakes, the gentle curve of the brake levers, the fluted cranks, the simple perfection of Conloy Asp rims etc. These are perfect industrial design icons individually. Collectively mounted on a frame finished and designed to the same sympathy of era and style and you get a profoundly elegant but still practical machine of the highest order. But a Henry Dreyfuss would scratch his head at those Gothic lugs and lettering and wonder why?
I'd still maintain that the British in particular could produce such bicycles better than anyone on aesthetics alone. But there remained that curious yet traditional English Industrial Revolution urge to make modern and practical look like a Gothic bookcase. It's like Brighton's Royal Pavillion where everything that looks Indian is made of... modern cast iron.
Peter Kohler Washington DC USA
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