Raymond Loewy was one of the most influential and wide-ranging industrial designers of the 20th century. Born in France, he emigrated to the United States in 1919 after serving in the French Army for four years during World War I. He attained the rank of captain and received the Croix de Guerre. Prior to the war, he was already a successful designer while in his teens.
Loewy first worked in America as a designer of window displays. But, his design career took off when he designed the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears Roebuck. Until he retired in 1980 at age 87, he designed locomotives, cigarette packages, vending machines and bottles for Coca Cola, the livery for Air Force One, the interiors of Greyhound buses, NASA’s Skylab space station, agricultural equipment for International Harvester, and cars for Studebaker.
Loewy had worked as a design consultant for Studebaker for nearly a quarter of a century when he was approached by the company’s president in 1961. He was asked to design a luxury coupe for 1963 that would attract more youthful buyers. Loewy, who owned a house in Palm Springs designed by Albert Frey, picked the city for an intense, 40-day design session with three other designers. The group included Tom Kellogg, who was then a student at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. When the clock ran out, the team had created the Avanti.
Though Loewy earned international praise for his design of the Studebaker Starlight, the Avanti was a complete departure. It seemed like the Starlight was the automotive equivalent of stodgy, post-war ranch houses. But, the Avanti was the equivalent of the mid-century architecture going up around Palm Springs by designers such as William Krisel, William Cody, Donald Wexler, Albert Frey, E. Stewart Williams, Hugh Kaptur, and John Lautner.
The boxed front end was radically different from any other car in existence, and it enhanced (rather than contrasted with) the space-age, aerodynamic design of the rest of the car’s body. The Avanti also featured a built-in roll bar, a padded interior, and door latches that were part of the structure of the vehicle. It was a powerful car with a 289-cubic-inch Studebaker V8 engine under the hood.
Sadly, Studebaker closed its South Bend, Indiana, factory and production of the Avanti effectively ceased with the 1964 model. However, the love generated by Loewy’s design was such that five different entrepreneurs continued to hand-build various iterations of the Avanti until 2006.
