Page 43 - Studio International - October 1972

(Left t10 right) One-Eleven 500, BAK- 91B, One Eleven 500 (plan) (Above) One-Eleven 400, (below) Jindivik 2B (Mk 102B)
radial engines tend to be feminine, whereas power-operated gun turrets appropriate for World War One. However, its remarkably clean
in-line engines and monoplanes, insofar as they fighting all the way to Berlin. They drew on the fuselage very closely resembles that of its
resemble biplanes sufficiently to merit a long-range experience of Imperial routes, while monoplane son, the Hurricane. Thus the Fury,
comparison, are more readily masculine. But their nearest Nazi equivalents, when they came, being a mixture of forms, creates an intrinsic
other things are rarely equal and, for example, were hurriedly designed along the lines of their aesthetic tension, alongside the fascinating
the Albatross easily overrides the aforementioned designers' previous experience. The French mixture of two epochs and two concepts.
tendencies to remain beautifully feminine, with multiplaces de combat, which resembled nothing Our full range of technico-aesthetic responses
its softly curving lines. A leaner, snake-like so much as airborne steam locomotives, were would appear, not as a line, but as a triangle,
shape might have returned it to a masculine curiously anomalous, given the French whose apexes are constituted by a certain
category. These associations are obviously not reputation for elegance. Probably their minimalism, a complex functionalism, and a set
objective, but they may well be common, or clumsiness arises from hesitations between the of hovering, structureless, but far from
comprise one of a few basic patterns, and, if so, obvious need for aggressive strategic bombing, insignificant, emotional projections. Each of
they ought to be certainly included in any and a specifically French need for flying these apexes represents an extreme point and
reasonably full account of aeronautical aesthetics. buttresses to the Maginot Line. Blunt, simple most responses will be all the richer for their
When Wren speaks of the Whitley's 'straight shapes would also have been favoured by the mixture of elements. One of the joys of aesthetic
lines and blunt tips' he certainly intends the cheap, easy production techniques suited to experience lies in its reconciliation of modes and
words to take their moral and characterological whatever was left over from France's relatively kinds of thought normally separated, and aircraft
overtones. At any rate, it would be most slender financial and technical resources once find a new kind of reconciliation between the
interesting to procure and compare a variety of the army had immured itself in its defensive most sensitive response to formal detail and
full-length portraits of aircraft, including the positions. A similar visual ugliness is found in unconscious fantasies, between narrow but
whole range of animistic, empathic and other many French films of the period, something of it vehement emotional projections and delicate
responses. subsists in the Citroen 2CV and it relates to the oscillations between mutually exclusive gestalt
As late as World War Two, the science of the Tati technology of Jour de Fête. The multiplace configurations, between the enjoyment of a
size and disposition of control surfaces has represents the dominance of fossilized strategies romantic delight and visible physics. For this
remained a sufficiently hit and miss affair for and the social influence of a poor peasantry, and reason, the impure contemplation of such totem
designers like Geoffrey de Havilland to use more for related reasons its nearest relatives are the objects as aircraft seems to me more fully
or less the same tail unit shape in every aircraft, Russian bombers of the period. aesthetic than the puritanical, or sometimes
large or small. Similarly, John Lloyd at schizoid, exclusivism of various avant-garde
Armstrong Whitworth in the thirties favoured exhortations to a reductionist sensibility (useful
conspicuously massive slab shapes.'° Hence, it's though this may be in clarifying and sensitizing
no more absurd to speculate about individual a hitherto neglected mode of response).
self-expression in aircraft design than in the case The aircraft itself exists in its relationship to
of an architect. It's certainly as relevant to its movements in flight. Aircraft identification
speculate about a kind of impersonal, cultural Inevitably an aircraft's form will read manuals regularly referred to 'sit' and 'feel'.
expression, arrived at, unselfconsciously, by differently as aircraft design alters. The once Thus the Whitley not only took off with a
relation to the situation which also moulds modernistic will come to seem lumbering, and crabwise slew, but, because its wings were set at
individual characters, and so becomes the so on. The problem exists for the fine arts also, nearly 9° to the axis of the fuselage, which itself
highest common factor of a social personality. but aircraft, like people, retain a constant sloped down to a prominent jowl, it looked in
Thus it's an odd fact that Nazi bombers tended identity even as they age, and much of this level flight as if it were plunging steadily
to be anguilline (like the Dornier 17 Flying identity may survive the ravages of time, downward at about 200. Near ground level the
Pencil) whereas English bombers tended to insofar as aircraft, as products of a particular effect could be dramatic. In newsreels the sleek
stately fuselages and bulldog chins. In fact, the situation, mingle features which convey the Schneider Trophy seaplane, buffeting and
Nazi bombers were designed primarily to gear in appropriate areas of reference. Thus the Hawker bucking on the smallest ripples as it taxies to
with blitzkriegs while the British planes were Fury is a bestrutted biplane, following the take-off, seems as fragile as glass and as awkward
built round the heavy bomb loads and configuration which had ruled the roost since as Baudelaire's albatross — the Symbolist
135