[A/S] New Airstream

[Ziggy Coyle & David Bauchspies <dmzcoyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Have you folks read this, from Wired Magazine


RVolution

The inside story of how Airstream is steering a hidebound industry into a
sleek new era.

By Warren St. John

One irony of America's fascination with life on the road is that, while there is
nothing quite as cool and romantic as the idea of striking out on the highway
for unknown destinations, there is really nothing quite as uncool and unromantic
as the way millions accomplish it: the RV. It's a problem of aesthetics. The
interior of so-called recreational vehicles - which include motor homes, trailers,
and those massive quasi-ranch houses with axles known as fifth wheels -
comes in two basic styles: cheap and plasticky (shag carpets, simulated
wood-grain cabinetry, the unbanishable smell of fiberglass solvents) and
expensive and plasticky (shag carpets, mood lighting, pastel upholstery, glass
partitions etched with images of big cats - think Graceland
jammed into a corridor). Even the vaunted Airstream, with its                  
gleaming aluminum monocoque, is only slightly more pleasing on
the interior than the cheap motel rooms it's designed to obviate.
This explains why even marginally style-conscious road warriors
 - the Merry Pranksters, Willie Nelson, John Madden - typically
pass on the mass-manufactured options and instead design their
own rides. For the people who build traditional RVs, this
phenomenon might be called the Curse of the Partridge Family;
the $12 billion industry is losing sales to people willing to redo old buses.

It is in this spirit of near desperation that Airstream, a sturdy
72-year-old company, is introducing a production model based
on a design by 39-year-old San Francisco arhitect and
furniture maker Christopher Deam. The Deam Airstream - which
was exhibited in prototype in December 2000 at the
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York and goes on
sale to the public in January - has a playfully minimalist interior
that combines long horizontal lines, clean plastic surfaces, and
sleek fixtures for a look more typical of a trendy studio
apartment in Stockholm than of something you hitch to the back
of the family wagon. Contrary to custom, it's actually stylish.

The story of the Deam Airstream is on of frictioned symbiosis
between the corporate and art worlds. In the early 1990s, Deam
 - who has degrees in architecture and urban design from Cal
Poly San Luis Obispo and Notre Dame, and who once worked for
Frank Gehry - opened a studio in San Francisco, where he
devoted himself principally to furniture and accessory design
using nontraditional materials. (One recent triumph is a folding
screen that has no moving parts; it's made of resin-impregnated
canvas with narrow swaths of plain canvas to allow for
"hinges.") When his brother bought a 675-square-foot house in
the Berkeley hills in 1992, Deam, along with fellow architect
Thom Faulders, took on the design job. The finished product,
based largely on studies of boat and RV interiors, was dubbed
the "Airstream Cottage" in the architectural press and won a
design award from the American Institute of Architecture. Deam
was glad for the attention but had no desire to work solely in
miniature. He turned his attention back to furniture and made his
name through an acclaimed line of high-modern designs for the home.

In 1999, Deam was approached by Wilsonart, which specializes
in plastic laminate, to design a booth for the company's display
at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the annual
design showcase in New York. Deam agreed, but instead of
creating a conventional booth out of Wilsonart's product - the
unsung medium of thin plastic panels - he thought back to the
RV that had inspired his first house. He gutted a vintage
Airstream trailer and rebuilt the interior using Wilsonart's plastic
and his own high-modern design. The Crossroads Project, as it
was called, got a lot of attention in the press and piqued the
curiosity of Wade Thompson, CEO of Thor Industries, the
corporate parent of Airstream and eight other RV manufacturers.
Thompson stopped by the furniture fair to have a look.

Airstream's customer base was shrinking - literally dying off. 
Deam told them why: "Young people aren't going to get in that 
old trailer that hillbillies and your parents used."

For Deam, the used Airstream was little more than a found
object, an ironic motif to demonstrate how Wilsonart's plastic
could be used to modernize even something so outdated as a
40-year-old trailer. The people at Thor saw something different:
The Crossroads' new look exposed their trailer's prehistoric
image. It was all well and good for Thor that movie stars and
collectors were snatching up vintage Airstreams and refurbishing
them, but the company was in the business of building and
selling new RVs, and its customer base was shrinking. "The main
customer is over 50," says Richard Riegel, VP of corporate
development at Thor. "As those people age, we lose customers.
They literally die off." Thor had been looking for ways to attract
younger buyers, and when company executives asked Deam if
he thought his design might broaden the Airstream's appeal,
Deam told them flatly, "Young people aren't going to get in that
old trailer that hillbillies and your parents used."

The real test for a Deam Airstream would come not from the
design community or even the executives at Thor, but from the
discriminating members of the Wally Byam Caravan Club
International. In July 2000, Airstream shipped the Crossroads RV
to the club's annual rally in Bismarck, North Dakota, for what
Thor's Riegel called "grandmother research." Airstream combed
over the trailer and filled out surveys ("I love the lighting, but
metal walls might have poor acoustics"). There were criticisms -
requests to make the convertible dinette/sleeper into a
permanent bed, for example - but overall the feedback was
enthusiastic.

Thor asked Deam to design a new interior for its 16-foot
Airstream Bambi - the company's most iconic trailer - and Deam
was game. But it wasn't as easy as all that. Airstream Inc. is
not known for its willingness to change. The company was
founded in 1929 by an LA advertising copywriter named Wally
Byam, who designed the first trailer himself and who remains the
namesake for the 10,000-member Airstream owners association.
Byam's vision - the wingless fuselage - is viewed within the
company as almost sacred, certainly not the sort of thing
random designers are permitted to dicker around with. Since its
inception, the company, based in Jackson Center, Ohio, has
redesigned the interior of the Airstream trailer exactly four
times. The executives at Thor - which owns Airstream outright -
are unusually deferential to the traditionalist attitudes 
of the people who actually build the trailers. "I'd say we present
challenges from the corporate level to Airstream," Riegel says of
the relationship between parent and subsidiary. "They're a proud
organization, and hiring Chris was a radical idea. It upset the
apple cart."


Ziggy Coyle
David Bauchspies