Harm Lagaay

Harm Lagaay ( born December 28, 1946 at the Hague, Netherlands) is a car designer and has influenced the design of many successful vehicles in the course of his professional career.

Life

Harm Lagaays professional career began in 1967 in Soest ( Netherlands) at the company Olyslager. 1968 moved to Lagaay carmaker Simca From 1971 he worked in the design department of Porsche in Weissach and was instrumental in the design of the models 911, 924 and 928.

After six years he was head of the design department at Ford in Cologne. There are several models, such as the Escort and Sierra wore his signature. In 1985 he moved to BMW Technik GmbH and became chief designer. One of the most popular projects from this period is in 1987 at the IAA presented Roadster BMW Z1.

From 1989 until his retirement on July 1, 2004, he was head of Porsche 's design department in Weissach. In addition to the studies Porsche Panamericana and Porsche 989 series models Porsche Boxster, Porsche Cayman, Carrera GT, Cayenne and 911 ( model series 964, 993 and 996 ) were defined stylistically significantly from it. His last work was the Porsche 911 model series 997, sold since 2004.

Since 1 November 2004 shall be operational by Michael Wall, who was previously chief designer at Saab, continued.

Lagaays design philosophy

In an interview Harm Lagaay discussed the curve shown as part of his design philosophy as:

" We call this S- curve a ' S-bend '. It has various functions. It bridges. He emphasizes something we want to express the Porsche 996 with the entire form, and that is a very strong convex-concave game. The S-bend consists of a convex part, which merges into a concave. It runs from the cowl forth initially convex modeled over the valley, crosses the valley and passes into the concave. The fascinating thing is if you have set this line once where they durchschlängelt through this mountain and the valley that they actually running! S this is not symmetric. The S makes before it hits the edge of the cowl, at the last moment a small arc.

The well-known from the Computer Design NURBS curve is emotionally not tangible, while each line is on a car a subjective history. A sphere, a cylinder and a cone are objectively assessable, ie not dependent on the taste of basic shapes. You can not say: I do not like the sphere or the cylinder. But as soon as you start to let geometric shapes flow into one another, the formation of certain subjective sensations. You can then say at once: . To me it does not like the way these forms run into each other here "