Imagining the Future: The Southern California Automotive Design Studio

Southern California has been home to more automotive design studios than anywhere else on the planet.

The Petersen Automotive Museum is teaming up with the Pasadena-based, world-renowned transportation design school, Art Center College of Design to showcase the history of the local design community and its contribution to the world.

Located in the Streetscape at the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Car Design Studio is at the modern end of a realistic walk through diorama of California's history as it relates to the automobile.

The exhibition will feature a combination of historic two-dimensional design studies, rare three-dimensional scale models, and other objects to illustrate how Los Angeles-based designers like Harley Earl rose to become some of the most important designers of their day and how their influence came to be so far reaching.

To bring the topic full circle, a part of the exhibit space will be devoted to a modern, functioning design studio.

Design demonstrations by Art Center students will occur in the exhibit on the second and fourth Sundays of each month starting January, 2009.