Making Mercedes-AMG Performance Car MSCHF
photo courtesy: MSCHF
During NYCxDesign Festival week, the MSCHF collective rolled up the doors to their Brooklyn garage to unveil a collection of car-themed furniture. The exhibition “MSCHF x AMG: Not for Automotive Use” introduced a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek automotive appropriation of Mercedes-AMG performance parts for sports cars. The parts had been transformed into a sofa, a fan, and even a trash can. The collective’s provocative approach provided a fresh take on industrial design, which was in part inspired by the Italian designer Achille Castiglioni, who once said “Design shouldn’t be trendy. Good Design should last over time, until it wears out.” The designed objects had limited availability for orders, though related merchandise from the collection remains on sale.
We spoke with MSCHF co-creative chief officer Kevin Wiesner about MSCHF’s recent work in cars. The collab with AMG is its most commercial foray into car culture. The launch included a car commercial that featured Youtuber Casey Neistat. But MSCHF has flexed its cleverness in past car projects in more elusive ways. The crowd-sourced shared PT Cruiser project called Key4All included a manifesto on the social dynamics of car ownership. It’s one of hundreds of projects conceived by the brain trust that delights in creative mind tricks. MSCHF always has something up the sleeve — the next project will be on view and open at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on July 8.
First, let’s talk about MSCHF’s interest in cars and how did it start?
AMG pretty much cold emailed us at some point to say hey you want to work on something together? They were like, if we're going to make a make a car with any significant modifications, we're looking at about a five- year runtime, and we as MSCHF had not existed for five years at that point. Furniture had been kind of like a longstanding interest of ours and it's one of these object categories that we have never really made before.
MSCHF has done one other car related project in the past, which was called “Key 4 All” where we got a 2005 PT Cruiser, a real beater, but they just have the simple RFID keys where you press the button and the car goes like beep-beep, the lights flash, and you hop in and you can drive it away. If you have more than one key fob set to the same frequency you can pair an arbitrary number of keys to a single vehicle. We made 5000 keys for that car that we sold online that were purchased in every state in the US. Anyone who had one had access to a little GPS tracker, where they could go find this car could hop in. They could drive it around, but as soon as they parked it anywhere and left it someone else with a key would swoop in and steal it from them and drive off with it, which was sort of this like grand experiment in communal ownership. It stayed on the roads for nine months and went coast to coast before the engine finally burned out.
“We had a lot of fun playing with the misuse of the cars as AMG intends them to exist.”
What is the collective’s relationship to cars? The PT cruiser is more about functionality but there are a lot of ideas there around transportation and even future mobility car sharing.
That project was very much about the car. (The car) is also a very private space. It's almost like an extension of your house. There was an element of risk usually associated with sharing a car, like you hesitate letting most people borrow your car thoughtlessly and to have total strangers invited into that space where it's traveling was a point of transgression.
Are there people inside of MSHCH who are car enthusiasts who are interested in this? Or did you come at it more from the functional aspect of the design challenge?
We've got a couple of car guys, but it's certainly the minority position within the group. There was a real appeal to the idea that we were basically stripping these fancy cars for parts and focusing in on the extremely trivial parts of the car that lent themselves well to the designs that we were making, which are obviously much more experimental. They're not even functional as far as furniture is concerned. We had a lot of fun playing with the misuse of the cars as AMG intends them to exist.
Tell me about like process. How did you obtain the parts?
They have a nice website where you can buy replacement parts. They have pretty much every part in the car, but the only pictures on the website were technical drawings. We found all these pieces we thought were super cool and we were designing furniture around them. Then we realized that there were no scale indicators anywhere. We had used all these things that turned out to be much bigger or much smaller shapes than they look in these little drawings. We got this giant cardboard box full of like miscellaneous parts from AMG and at the studio and when we were unpacking. This fan that we thought was waist-high turns out to be part of the AC system and it's actually two inches tall. There was a little bit of a of a learning curve.
Eventually as we got further into it, we traveled out to their factory floor in Affalterbach.They really hang their hat on is this idea that each engine is made by one person, so you have this kind of like inverse assembly line where like one person and their workstation travels passed all the parts instead of all the parts like individually being added to assembly line where the people are standing still. We’re manufacturing geeks over here so cool go see that.
How has the reception been since its now out in the wild?
It's fairly obvious to people that the chair made out of the three headrests is not intended to be replacement for whatever your dining room chairs are at this moment, but I think a lot of people seem to be understanding the spirit in which the objects have been made. It's pretty gratifying to see, because it's also a very different thing for us to be opening up the door to our studio at all. For a very long time we've tried to hide the internal workings as much as possible, so it's nice that people are enjoying the fact that the objects were shown in a working context in a shop.
Which of the objects is your favorite or captures the intention and of the project for you?
I think the trash can came out really well. It's also probably the object that was hardest to convince AMG to do. When we were first pitching the idea that we would make a furniture collection, the one thing that they came back with that they were adamant about do not make an AMG toilet. That's where we draw the line, but we ended up with a trash can and I think it's great.
I imagine it made you want to think more about the intersection between art design and automotive and where that's going.
We will certainly have to see. We also got to do some fairly exciting driving for the video shoot for the Casey Neistat spot.
Did they take you to the track?
There’s a lot that's in Brooklyn where we had had set up for that, but it was in a big flat open space, nice view of the river. We're driving in circles really fast, and I think some of some of our non-car people came away surprised by how much fun they had.