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The nascent Genesis luxury brand is busy generating a distinctive styling language for its cars right now, but that doesn’t mean it can’t look a few years ahead. A team gathered from the rapidly expanding Genesis design ranks put together two proposals for what it thinks a GT might look like in the year 2025. Then, curious to see what outside counsel might come up with, Genesis sponsored a design project (using the same “Vision 2025” brief) with students at ArtCenter College of Design. We saw all of the designs displayed in scale-model form during the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance weekend in Monterey.
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We can’t say for sure if any of these designs directly preview a future Genesis model—Genesis wouldn’t say, either—but the design brief indicates that the company’s designers are at least thinking of a halo coupe for the brand. The two in-house Genesis designs (both silver, pictured above) incorporate classic GT proportions with long hoods and low, swept rooflines. One has a decided Batmobile vibe, with contrasting-color rear haunches, zany central fin elements between its taillights, and headlights that wrap vertically around parts of the front wheel openings. The other is squarer, with a central fuselage flanked by architectural fender assemblies with openings between them and the main body. If this treatment seems familiar, it’s because today’s Ford GT supercar boasts similar flourishes around its rear wheels.
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If the two Genesis designs shared anything, it was a lack of a clearly recognizable “Genesis-ness.” That isn’t a dig against Genesis, since “Genesis-ness” is something still being formed. This reality also seemed to level the playing field between the company’s own concepts and those made by the students. On display at Pebble were four ArtCenter GT ideas, the work of Jessica Yun (the black, blunt-nosed car), Abel Gonzales (the red one), Rung Lee (the blue one), and Emin Abranians (the black, horizontally layered car).
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Each student’s take on a future Genesis GT was attractive in its own way, although two stood out. Abranians’s layer-cake style seemed highly abstract at first, but he explained that the finned body pieces are intended to scrub pollution from the air. (Similar ribbed and mesh paneling has captured the imaginations of some architects, too—the idea is that the panels “catch” air pollution, gradually filling out with crud into a solid form.) Lee’s design was equally wild and sported intricate surface changes as well as a spinelike “beam” inspired by traditional Korean architecture.
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It could be that none of these designs—or any like them—could trickle into Genesis showrooms, but then again, who knows? Genesis is an all-new brand, which makes it an exciting blank slate for any designer.
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