IT TOOK A CREW of three men, a tracked Kubota skid-steer and nearly eight hours of grunt to unearth a long-forgotten automotive marvel from the frozen soil of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Buried for years among the elements under rubber sheeting and engulfed by trees and shrubs, an original surviving example of Strother MacMinn’s incredible Le Mans Coupe was finally exhumed. It was Marvin Horton’s 1960 round-tube-chassis car, inexplicably found to be in solid condition.
It is significant that the Le Mans Coupe was designed by Strother MacMinn, an American designer whose impact on the automotive world was a result not of his own creations, but rather his influence through thousands of students during his long tenure (1948 to 1998) teaching at ArtCenter College of Design.
The string of MacMinn disciples reads like a Who’s Who of American design, spanning half a century: Frank Stephenson, Chris Bangle, Ken Okuyama, Freeman Thomas, Wayne Cherry, J Mays, Peter Brock, Chip Foose, Robert Cumberford, Larry Shinoda, Stewart Reed, Chuck Pelly, Jack Telnack, Ron Hill, Shiro Nakamura, Bob Gurr… As a result, MacMinn is widely acknowledged as the most important US automotive design scholar of the 20th Century.
Designer and MacMinn student Raffi Minasian said: ‘Mac wrote, illustrated, and chronicled the importance of design as part of the modern car experience. He, more than anyone, took the ideas of magazine, made your imagination of reading car articles go in all sorts of directions, and made design something artistic, not just technical. It was, as he often liked to say, jazz, not classical. The fluidity and openness of jazz was like car design to him.’
