June 14, 2003 - This year’s Eyes on Design Automotive Design Exhibit will take place on June 22 at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. The event will open with a brunch presentation by Wayne Cherry, GM's fifth head of design, who will retire this autumn. Car Design News expects that the name of the sixth will be announced during the presentations, and in this series of articles we are celebrating the five men who have carried GMs very distinct design torch, and have contributed to a remarkable consistency. Third man out is Irv Rybicki.

Irv who??  Which is exactly what this instalment is all about. He followed in the footsteps of a larger-than-life character, Bill Mitchell, who may have had some perverse pleasure in putting Irwin W. Rybicki in the position of Vice President, Design at General Motors. Rybicki would be no threat to the living memory of the flamboyant, dramatic Mitchell.

More people listened to the ex-Vice president then than the one in charge. You can count the column inches written about the two after the 1977-78 change of guards. I have some Rybicki snippets from Cadillac and Chevrolet enthusiast’s magazines, two 1983 Automotive news articles, some comments in a 1980 Auto&Design, and a not very interesting interview by C. Edson Armi, who at the time (1985) was professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina. By contrast, there are huge scrap books filled with Mitchell-articles.

But consider the odds. When Mitchell left we had experienced the first oil crisis. The Energy and Conservation Act of 1975 was taking effect and influenced the 1977-78 models. New safety measures dictated how important parts, especially the front and rear, of the car should look. Forget integrated, sculptured lines for at least the next ten years. The whole design/engineering fraternity was so confused that dropheads were actually believed to be outlawed!

It was the era of reduction. It was also the era when the US car industry had to meet high quality, cheap and bland imports, and the domestic industry did not know what to give preference to: design, engineering, downsizing... pure confusion all over the place.

And, lastly, during Rybicki’s time there General Motors made such a mess of itself that some years after he left we experienced a de facto take over by the non-GM members of the board. Happy days.

Rybicki's deck was very badly stacked. All the cars were bad during the late seventies, the Chryslers, the Fords, but the GM cars seemed the worst, because they used to be top. But their GM Europe counterparts, or the Americans working at Opel or Vauxhall at the time, Dave Holls, Hank Haga, and let’s include Chuck Jordan even if he left Opel as early as 1970, all showed that they were able to design great compact cars. But the home grown 1977-79 models were plain horrible.

I don’t think anyone can point to any real Rybicki deficiencies when discussing this era. But he reintroduced the Earl system of locked studios and anonymous leaders in a vertical organisation. And, worst of all (according to Mitchell) he used clinics and consumer research... “Show me an real artist who asked the public what it prefers. You should tell the public what they want, and they’ll want it. Don’t use the rear view mirror”. Shades of Bob Lutz here.

The answer to why Rybicki was selected to follow Mitchell may still be found in some dark GM archives and might be of interest to those studying corporate psychology. At the time it was obvious that Rybicki, Dave Holls and Chuck Jordan were groomed by Mitchell to be his successors. All had some obvious qualities and some good designs to their names. But Rybicki turned out to be the one who lost – he became head of design. Charlie “Chuck” Jordan survived these years unscathed as the design director, the second in command.

Rybicki's design themes were somewhere in between the round Earle shapes and the Mitchell razor-edge. The 1984 Corvette demonstrates his way of interpreting Form that follows Function. The 1986 Eldorado is just the right side of handsome and boring. But it is wrong talking about his designs. Part of the interview with C. Edson Armi went like this: “Which is the one (project) that you are most proud of?” “The one WE are going to do next”. But the one that YOU did?” “The one that I did? I don’t think I ever did a car in total for General Motors...” ”Can you remember a car that you influenced a great deal and with which you were very satisfied?” “There were many. It’s difficult to answer. There are a lot of reasons for not nailing it down”. “Aren’t you worried about your posterity?” “I never worry about things such as that. They have to judge me on what I’ve done. If they choose to forget after I leave, so be it.”

What I find interesting about the Rybicki era is that he appreciated the 'clean and simple' themes, the Bill Porter Firebird, and the Henry Haga Camaro, both 1970 model year, were cited by him in such a way that made him sound like a born-again Bauhaus disciple. And he was in a way responsible - at that time he was Bill Mitchell's assistant in charge of all automotive design.

He 'rescued' Bill Porter again, after this extremely creative artist had become persona non grata in the Mitchell household. The 1985 Electra was one of the results. He talked about “slippery” and remembered the cars’ Cw-values down to three figures. He hated the bodies from the fifties - “Just bad taste”. He liked them small and thanked the energy conservation thinking for cars that are the “correct size”. But we will never know if he would have been able to move the GM design tradition forward. He left in October 1986 after the ten most dismal and dreary years in GM’s corporate and design history.