It all began two years ago. The Design teams at Groupe Renault, led by Stéphane Janin, regularly work on future-looking topics unrelated to our range renewals. The exercise helps them to explore new ways forward and brings creative staff “recreational” moments.
The teams decided to investigate the topic of “French cultural objects”. Their research and inspirations soon led them back to the golden age of the automobile in the 1930s. The influence of Le Corbusier (1887-1965), -the Swiss born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris who was fondly called as Le Corbusier- asserted itself as the obvious source of reflection, as a sort of conceptual prequel to the modern automobile. However, the Coupé doesn't seem to take much from Le Corbusier's Minimum Car, which exists only as sketches, and was born out the architect's obsession with the manufacturable precision of the automobile industry.
The Design teams at Groupe Renault are proud to pay homage to the visionary architect and designer who reinvented architecture and made it more broadly accessible. His thought and value structure is one that we share at Renault.
Renault say taht Corbusier Coupe is inspired only on some of Le Corbusier's ideas as simplicity and visible structure. So your shape allows us to see the design of its structure, and to view, near the wheel, a specific space that serves as car boot. The mechanics of this Renault Concept Coupe Corbusier is unknown and may well go for an all-electric system, so the dream of a typical V12 of the decade of the 30s seems a chimera.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the disappearance of Le Corbusier, France’s Centre des Monuments Nationaux is organizing the exhibition “Des voitures à habiter: automobile et modernisme XXe-XXIe siècles” (“Cars for living: the automobile and modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries”) at the Villa Savoye in Poissy from October 22, 2015 to March 20, 2016.
Read the press release (in French) on the event at http://presse.monuments-nationaux.fr/fr/accueil/.
