When you think of Japan and of the art forms that the nation has produced throughout its history, you can’t help but think of purity, essentiality and entire universes of form distilled into a few simple strokes. Kevin Rice – director of Mazda’s style centre in Frankfurt – emphasised this during a very special visit organised for a select group of journalists. Immediately afterwards, however, he went on to say this: “Our current direction, Kodo Design, is inspired by purity together with a certain dynamism. These are two uncompromising elements, and we must learn to make them coexist.” The unexpected and fascinating solution to this dilemma lies in the manual process of clay modelling: “This is where we begin when we want to imagine the shape of a new car”, explains Rice.
Behind him, the expert Japanese modeller Norio Terauchi demonstrated how every millimetre of this magic clay of the car designer is manipulated to create the desired form. We were all so amazed by his skills that we almost forgot about the Koeru, the scarlet prototype anticipating the latest generation CX-5 and presented at Frankfurt in 2015, which now gleamed at us from a corner.
The flame red bodywork of the Koeru led us into the next part of our visit, a tour of the colour and trim department, whose team strives to create new colours that are both deeper and brighter at the same time. But one of the best parts of our visit was kept until last, where an actual car designer created a rendering of each journalist’s dream car. You’ll be able to read about this in more detail in the next edition of Auto&Design…
