William L. Porter, a car designer who contributed to creating the forms of some of the most famous American vehicles in the late 1960s and early 70s, died on April 25 in his house in Whitmore Lake, Michigan. He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son Adam, who did not specify a cause.
As a senior designer at General Motors for more than three decades, Mr. Porter was closely involved in the determination of the appearance of numerous cars, which were uniquely American in their exuberant, elongated design and corner forms. These were large, slim cars for long, empty American roads, and for cities that were filled with the parking lots that they could accommodate, easy years from the compact boxes for the narrow streets of Europe.
The Pontiac GTO model, which was produced in 1968 and 1969, with its endless hood and its smooth, rejuvenating reeformation – its “Monocoque shell with elliptical pressure bulges over the wheels”, as Mr. Porter ES made in an interview – was one of his characteristic creations.
GM made him chief designer of Pontiac 1 in 1968 and held this position until 1972 before he went to other senior design positions. In the early 1970s, he directed the design of the Lemans' cars, Catalina and Bonneville of the company, which had rejuvenating shapes with ruffles as part of its aesthetics.
“I was taken with a simple, winding look with long, muscular shapes on the elliptical vocabulary,” said Porter, a connoisseur and collector of American design, including Tiffany Glass and handicraft furniture, in an interview with the Hot Rod Magazine in 2007.
Kevin Kirbitz, the President of the Society of Automotive historian and Senior Manager at GM, said in an interview: “It depends on his understanding of shapes, curvature and lines. He had the ability to look at a curve and to recognize that she had to have a certain share of the length.”
Mr. Porter was attracted to what he found “organic shapes” or in nature, who had subliminal response for the viewer (or the buyer) of a car.
“He would talk about the round of the bean,” said Mr. Kirbitz, who knew Mr. Porter well, and also about “naturally occurring curves”.
The Firebird and the Firebird Trans on 1970-73, the typical American muscle car, also wore the stamp of Mr. Porter: they were more sporty than the GTO with a more compact baking-end, but a similarly elongated hood.
With the Firebirds, said Mr. Porter, “he consciously tried to create an important American sports car”.
Mr. Porter's training in art history gave him an aesthetic idea of the car that was unusual with a large American car manufacturer.
“If you open the Firebird's door, there is – I would like to think – a subliminal feeling for the unity of the interior and the outdoor area. That has never been done before,” said Porter in the interview from 2000. “There was a feeling that the entire car that was in it and things were in the right places.”
He was a designer who gave acute attention to detail what he learned from mentors among GM General Managers, which he praised in a post on his website because he was the way “a bump could be seen in a line that was perhaps a millimeter”.
Mr. Porter was particularly proud of a detail that he designed for the Trans-am transfers: “A few highly effective RAM air shovels that were placed in the high-pressure area on the front edge,” he said to penetrate air directly into the engine.
After Mr. Porter developed the new Firebird, he worked on Camaro. In 1980 he became chief designer for Buick, a position that he held until his retirement in 1996. He worked on designs for Park Avenue and the Riviera, boxing cars with a more impressive presence on the street.
William Lee Porter was born on May 6, 1931 in Louisville, Ky. His father William Lee Porter Sr. was the manager of the greyhound bus station in Louisville; His mother, Ida Mae (Hampton) Porter, led the lunchroom in a local primary school.
He visited the Dupont Manual High School in Louisville and in 1953 received a BA in painting and art history from the University of Louisville.
After college, he served in the US Army and then studied industrial design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1957 it was discontinued as a summer student at GM Styling, the company's design unit. Next year he became a full -time position. When he received his MA from Pratt in 1960, he was already a junior designer in the Pontiac Studio.
During the most of his time at GM, Mr. Porter also taught a course in industrial design at Wayne State University in Detroit and encouraged the students to create objects that were influenced by styles that fascinated him, including handicrafts and art lights.
In addition to his son, Mr. Porter is survived by his wife Patsy Jane (Hambaugh) Porter; Two daughters, Sarah Wilding Porter and Lydia Porter Latocki; A brother, Thomas Hampton Porter; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Porter was the rare stylist who saw the shape of a car as a whole, with each individual element that was subordinate to the overall design and integrated into it.
“He was one of those who had this ability to go beyond this and to recognize the general aesthetics of the line,” said Kirbitz. “He would talk about how one ellipse fed in another and how there are no real straight lines. For him, the straight line was not desirable.”