Still, travelling in cars was a new experience. In Maryland, Wright proposed a helical ramp wrapped around Sugarloaf Mountain – so that driving to the summit would become an experience akin to circling in an aircraft. Other great modernist architects shared this infatuation with the automobile: Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris replaced Haussmann’s historic city with tower blocks connected by speeding motorways. At Lingotto in Turin, the Italian Futurist architect Giacomo Mattè-Trucco built a factory combined with a rooftop test-track for Fiat – a compelling demonstration of speed, as Aldous Huxley argued, being the single novel experience of the twentieth century.
And in cinema and pop music, the car became a human proxy. Racing a Mercury Coupe towards a cliff in a game of chicken in Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean expressed the glamour of delinquency. In 1955, Dean killed himself in a Porsche 550RSK and made the celebrity collision a modern cultural staple. Others followed his tragic arc, notably the goalkeeper-turned-existentialist Albert Camus, whose last journey was in a luxurious, over-powered and under-braked Facel Vega.
More innocently, The Beach Boys knew they would have “Fun, Fun, Fun” until “Daddy” repossessed his misappropriated Ford Thunderbird. And when, in 1967’s The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman fretfully drove an Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider across San Francisco’s Bay Bridge between the Embarcadero and Yerba Buena, the pretty car helped him create a universal symbol of erotic yearning. Back in London, Marc Bolan couldn’t drive, but was so infatuated by cars that his best-ever lyric, addressed to a woman, was: “You’ve got a hub-cap diamond star halo.”