The Classic Car Adventure by Lance Cole

Author:Lance Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Saab Heroes: Sixten Sason

Who was the designer who created a new fashion in a small-medium sector car that looked like an expensive UFO of a coupé?

Karl Sixten Andersson was born in Skovde, Sweden in 1912 and it was not until the 1930s that as an emerging designer and stylist, he altered his last name to ‘Sason’, alluding to ‘spice’ and less common than the ubiquitous Andersson. But Sason was no flamboyant artist as he was also an engineer, a calm thinker who could work with men like Ljungström and Mellde. Ljungström said of him, ‘A genius; an engineer with the talents of an artist, or an artist with the temperament of an engineer...the ideal partner to work with.’

Tall, handsome, a debonair and charming Swede with a taste for Italian style, Sason was a pilot and a technical thinker. His 1930s ideas for a micro-car predated the post-war German designs by over a decade and his designs included a people carrier and an aerodynamic, low slung, steam-powered limousine. UrSaab was novel yet timeless, certainly not a quickly-dating fashion. The Saab 92 was an amalgamation of ideas and themes that manifested not as a retro-pastiche, but as something genuinely new. But the 92 was not Sason’s only defining work. From an early fascination with flying, he trained as a pilot in the Swedish Air Force, but in an aircraft crash his chest was penetrated by a wing strut, he lost a lung and was struck down by infection, remaining in hospital for months, yet within a few short years he had re-invented himself as an illustrator and then as an industrial designer. He also studied silver-smithing and that passion may explain some of the exquisite detailing in his designs, be they cars, cookers or cameras. By 1939, he had started to work in the illustration department of the rapidly expanding aircraft maker that was Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget – the SAAB as Swedes termed it. Initially, he specialised in producing x-ray type see-through structural drawings of Saab aircraft and their components.

He also designed the Husqvarna Silver Arrow motorcycle in 1955, the Hasselblad camera of 1948 and the company’s later 1600F series. Sason shaped the first 1940s Electrolux Z70 vacuum cleaner, the Monark moped, and not only a Husqvarna chain saw, but also that manufacturer’s waffle cooker – a stunning device that looked just like a spaceship or UFO beamed in to Area 51, or Hangar 18 at Wright Patterson’s secret air force base, the place where in the war years Alex Tremulis sketched and styled flying saucer shaped devices for the U.S. Military, before he designed the Tucker.

Sason also came up with a defining shape of the electric iron – one copied even today. He designed the ‘Zig-Zag’ sewing machine, and his drawing board and studio were packed with sketches for boats as well as elliptically shaped flying machines of great futurism. He also designed a proposal for a curved-buttress supported suspension bridge at Oresund. All this work was product design and industrial design with a scale of function and perfection without excess.

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