A Century in Motion – Part 15: The 1990s, a Century Turning the Page

Enzo Ferrari leaves the stage in 1988, on the 14th of August, bequeathing as his testament a car capable of driving the whole world to distraction: the F40. It is the car that celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Prancing Horse, and it delivers a precise message — that he had always known how to look ahead. A twin-turbo V8, composite materials, nearly 500 horsepower for a weight just over a thousand kilograms. A statement of excellence that the ninety-year-old Enzo wished to leave as the signature of his extraordinary life. On the 7th of August, exactly one week before his death, with his health already deeply undermined, he asks his son Piero to watch the Hungarian Grand Prix with him on television. He drifts off; when he wakes — revealing in that one question the depth of a relationship with Alfa Romeo that had been first affectionate, then bitter — he asks his son in what positions the Alfas were running.
“Papà, they aren't there. They don't race any more.” The reply.
A photograph from 1987 captures Enzo Ferrari seated beside his son Piero, who holds in his hands the scale model of the future Ferrari F40 — the car that would be officially unveiled the following year, and that would remain the last Ferrari launched under the supervision of il Drake.
It was, in all likelihood, a message intended for those who — once his own day had come — would have to face increasingly aggressive rivals, McLaren chief among them. Indeed, in 1992, on the wave of its world championships in Formula 1, this very English marque produced a road-going GT bearing the designation F1, destined to become an icon. A central driving position flanked by two passenger seats set slightly back, one on either side, and a 6,000 cc V12 of 630 horsepower: proof that technology was advancing at a pace until then unknown — one has only to look at the Mercedes CLK GTR for a further example.
Unveiled in 1992, the McLaren F1 rewrote the rules of the supercar: a three-seat cabin with central driving position, a carbon-fibre chassis, and a naturally aspirated BMW V12 capable of reaching 391 km/h. A record that, to this day, makes it the fastest naturally aspirated production car in the world.
This is not a matter concerning the automobile alone, but everything around it — as we now know well: digital computation, computers, the Web become a reality the car is swift to embrace. In a world where humanoid robots promise to render unrecognisable the difference between human and post-human, even magnificent women may reveal themselves as the unsettling sovereigns of an uncertain tomorrow.
It is no surprise that the dream of restoring Bugatti to the splendour of its past does not meet with the response that a lasting success would have deserved. The future is obligatory — and this is precisely what the Renault Avantime seeks to declare.
In the 1990s, with the explosion of the Internet and of digital computation, the world enters a new era in which computer and network begin to redefine communication, industry, and the collective imagination. In parallel, research into humanoid robotics opens scenarios drawn from science fiction.
Fashion is projected toward a new kind of luxury, and the film The Devil Wears Prada interprets, with great accuracy, the aggression of years in which the serpent can be raised to a symbol. So it is in the automobile, with the Dodge Viper; and so it is in architecture too, with those rounded volumes typical of a serpent coiled to strike — as in the Getty Center on the American West Coast, designed by Richard Meier, where architecture itself reaches for that same unsettling message.
All of this to the soundtrack of Guns N' Roses, who — with “Take me down to the Paradise City” — are the first to bring a synthesizer into the mix.
It is the end of a century. On to the next…
The Getty Center, inaugurated in 1997 and designed by Richard Meier, anticipates the future through its architecture of pure volumes, of light, and of suspended spaces — where museum and landscape become a single experience.