Transport Design
Gregory VotolatoA design history that investigates the experience of travel, analysing the vehicle from the passengers' and drivers' points of view. It takes us inside a range of vehicles, from buses and limousines to dugout canoes and 'superferries', to aircraft such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Apollo spacecraft.
Transport Design is the first design history to investigate the experience of travel, analysing the vehicle from the passengers’ and drivers’ points of view. Gregory Votolato takes us inside a wide range of vehicles, from buses and limousines to dugout canoes and ‘superferries’, to aircraft such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Apollo spacecraft. Organised in three parts - air, land and sea - Transport Design shows how the design of a vehicle shapes our experience of the journey, from home to work, or from the earth to the stars.
In an authoritative yet accessible style, Votolato explores the relationship between mass transportation and the travel experience, taking into account the pressures of global commerce and global warming, and argues for a radical reappraisal of how and why we travel. Themes explored include comfort, safety, technology, style, economics, customization and entertainment, acknowledging along the way the contributions of important individuals, such as entrepreneur George Mortimer Pullman and the ship designer Dorothy Marckwald.
Throughout, Votolato encourages us to see and to question our travel experiences in relation to the design of the vehicles in which we travel. Apparent banalities, such as the travel seat, are revealed as having great significance: from Theodore Woodruff’s nineteenth-century railway sleeping compartments to Marc Newson’s sleeping pods for long-haul flyers, or today’s ergonomically contoured and electronically adjustable car seats, furniture designed for transportation has consistently led the furnishings of homes and offices in the technology they employ to provide personally tailored comfort, the Holy Grail of transport design.
For the reader interested in how we travel, or for the designers of our future vehicles, Gregory Votolato provides an insightful, readable and often entertaining account of two centuries of travel design.
A design history that investigates the experience of travel, analysing the vehicle from the passengers' and drivers' points of view. It takes us inside a range of vehicles, from buses and limousines to dugout canoes and 'superferries', to aircraft such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Apollo spacecraft.
Transport Design is the first design history to investigate the experience of travel, analysing the vehicle from the passengers’ and drivers’ points of view. Gregory Votolato takes us inside a wide range of vehicles, from buses and limousines to dugout canoes and ‘superferries’, to aircraft such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Apollo spacecraft. Organised in three parts - air, land and sea - Transport Design shows how the design of a vehicle shapes our experience of the journey, from home to work, or from the earth to the stars.
In an authoritative yet accessible style, Votolato explores the relationship between mass transportation and the travel experience, taking into account the pressures of global commerce and global warming, and argues for a radical reappraisal of how and why we travel. Themes explored include comfort, safety, technology, style, economics, customization and entertainment, acknowledging along the way the contributions of important individuals, such as entrepreneur George Mortimer Pullman and the ship designer Dorothy Marckwald.
Throughout, Votolato encourages us to see and to question our travel experiences in relation to the design of the vehicles in which we travel. Apparent banalities, such as the travel seat, are revealed as having great significance: from Theodore Woodruff’s nineteenth-century railway sleeping compartments to Marc Newson’s sleeping pods for long-haul flyers, or today’s ergonomically contoured and electronically adjustable car seats, furniture designed for transportation has consistently led the furnishings of homes and offices in the technology they employ to provide personally tailored comfort, the Holy Grail of transport design.
For the reader interested in how we travel, or for the designers of our future vehicles, Gregory Votolato provides an insightful, readable and often entertaining account of two centuries of travel design.
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A serious but accessible look at how comfort, safety, technology, style, economics, customisation and entertainment have affected the way we get from a to b, and how vehicle design has influenced the interiors of our home and work spaces. A bit of a treat.
'RIBA Journal
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This is a generalist study of the best kind, full of illuminating detail and clearly organized by typologies of land, water and air, within which are subdivisions of different vehicle types. It is split in focus between the designer of the machine and the experience of the passenger, with a pleasingly fetishistic attention to detail that distinguishes transport enthusiasts.
'Journal of Design History
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Far from being a straight design history, this insightful and detailed look at transport design investigates, through our various vehicles, the experience of travelling . . . the meticulous nature of Votolato's theming and readable narrative underpin the seriousness of his final contention . . . this fine book should be required reading for anyone hoping to design anything that will take us beyond the age of oil.
'C20, The Magazine of the Twentieth Century Society
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a thoughtful, careful examination of how design, mostly fashioned during the past two centuries, has affected travelers on land and water, and more recently in the air . . . No reader will likely ever look at the artifacts of transportation, either past or present, in the same way . . . Transport Design deserves a large reading audience.
'The Historian
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[Votolato] understands the interlinked roles played by designers, manufacturers, operators, and users in the construction of the semiotically rich technological spaces in which we move, while not ignoring the structural reality that, both historically and in the present, governments and corporations have the greatest control over transport systems. And Votolato's empirical reach is commendably ambitious . . .
'Technology and Culture
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At last, the book that reveals the art and romance of being transported
'Marc Newson
INTRODUCTION
1 LAND
2 WATER
3 AIR
CONCLUSION
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Gregory Votolato is a Lecturer at the Victoria & Albert Museum and teaches on the Critical and Historical Studies Vehicle Design Programme at the Royal College of Art, London. He is the author of American Design in the Twentieth Century (1998), Transport Design: A Travel History (Reaktion, 2007) and Ship (Reaktion, 2011).
