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Sure, the Milwaukee Art Museum is beautiful, but could you drive it?

Barbara Whalen, design manager for Ford Motors, says the museum’s Santiago Calatrava-designed addition is the aesthetic inspiration for the 2010 Ford Taurus.
Lon Zaback, the car’s interior design manager, says the Taurus’ cabin attempts to capture “Calatrava’s irresistible rhythm, form and structure.”

The door panel recesses and the boomerang-like handles do seem to echo the arched, skeletal corridor of the MAM’s galleria. Zaback repeats this motif on the car’s forward-sweeping center console – canted at a 38-degree angle that engineers deemed impossible. This melds into a wing-like form below the dashboard’s brise soleil-themed visors. Even the car’s seats sport Calatrava contours, he notes.

“The Calatrava contradicts the perception that Milwaukee is simply a practical place,” says Earl Lucas, exterior design manager for the 2010 Taurus. But he notes you’ll see the old Beer Town spirit in the Taurus’ sheet metal and strong horizontal lines.

All told, this is quite an inspirational town. “There’s a perception that Europeans appreciate great design but Americans don’t,” says Zaback. “But Milwaukee’s role in erecting a must-see building is powerful evidence to the contrary.”

After we finished patting ourselves on the back, we called the Journal Sentinel’s former architecture critic, Whitney Gould, to compare the new Taurus with the old Calatrava. Each explores plasticity with materials that began as a liquid, she muses: Calatrava with concrete; Zaback with polyurethane spray-on door upholstery.

“I think that the Calatrava homage is most evident in the door panel, which definitely takes a cue from the boomerang arches,” Gould says. “The similarities are much less obvious in the exterior, although it’s a much zippier version of the old stodgy Taurus.

“It’s inevitable that others would take a cue from the pavilion,” she adds. “There is a fine line between homage and gimmickry, and Ford’s designers have walked right up to the edge of that line.” Actually, they drove.