by Richard Seymour In the 1950’s, George W. Walker, Vice President and Director of Styling at Ford published a small booklet entitled Styling at Ford Motor Company. Once a self-promotional freebee, it is now a precious historical document. A repository of confidence, vision and ebullient intent. Ford’s styling studio took the time to look 50 years into the future and put forward a series of dreams for the Millennium and, like all such dreams, they are charmingly dislocated from the actuality. Self-levitating hovercars glide silently though Saarinen-inspired domestic cathedrals. Picnicking couples grin through their tans as the neighbours pop over for uranium cocktail. The staged photographs of the styling studio itself are even more telling. The gods of auto design stand foursquare, ‘ratpack’ suits and carwaxed hairstyles glittering under the worklamps, whilst earnest craftsmen slick the impossibly gauche clay models. It seems the sun always shone in this post-war utopia.