Phil Patton
Phil Patton | |
|---|---|
Patton in 2004 | |
| Born | Lewis Foster Patton March 23, 1952 Durham, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Died | September 22, 2015 (aged 63) Wayne, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, journalist, critic, teacher, freelance writer |
| Genre | History, Culture, Technology, Design and Automotive journalism |
| Spouse |
Joelle Delbourgo
(m. 1976, d. 1996)Kathleen Hamilton (m. 2007) |
| Website | |
| philpatton | |
Phil Patton (March 23, 1952 – September 22, 2015) was an American freelance journalist, book author, teacher, editor, and design and curatorial consultant, widely known for his sense of curiosity and his focus on design, technology, culture, history — and, extensively, automotive subjects.
Phil Patton, excerpts
- From his article, Agents of Change, American Heritage, 1994:
- "For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery? Who figured out how to market the nails in neat plastic blister packs hung from standardized wire racks in hardware stores? The house of history, that clever balloon frame of statistics and biographies in which we shelter our sense of tradition, of progress, of values gained and lost, is nailed together with anonymity. Too often we look at history instead as a half-timbered castellated structure, focusing on the carved keystones above the doors bearing the faces of Napoleon or Lincoln, Voltaire or Descartes, Michelangelo or Machiavelli. History tends to neglect the nails, the nuts and bolts of daily life."
- From the New York Times: Writing in depth on the development of new automotive paints, from his article, Harvest Season for the '08 Car Colors, 2008:
- "And disruptive events occur in the process, like the arrival a few years ago of Xirallic pigments from the automotive coatings division of Merck, the drug giant. Developed in Japan, the pigments are made with aluminum particles coated with titanium oxide. The result is paint with a crystalline glitter and a sparkling effect of depth. The new pigments provide pearl effects, "just a slight highlight shift." They are a kind of sophisticated version of candy apple."
- From Fortune Magazine: In 2013, Patton described the front end of the forthcoming Jeep Cherokee as "protoplasmic: a paramecium of daytime running lamps and an amoeba of a headlight," adding: "A broad lower grille evokes the tiger mouth of recent Kias."
Described as a design guru, Patton's reportage and essays were regularly carried by a host of news outlets, magazines and online media, from Wired and Esquire to I.D. magazine. He served as commentator on PBS, the History Channel, NBC Today, CBS Sunday Morning, and The Charlie Rose Show. He authored books on subjects ranging from the American highway system to the inter-relationship of television and professional football — and co-authored a book on everyday objects with the design team of star-architect Michael Graves. He taught design classes at numerous schools, including at New York's School of Visual Arts, urging his students "to look".
Patton was known for parsing the details of a seemingly insignificant design element and then extrapolating its relationship to humanity at large, identifying what the New York Times called the "deeper cultural messages". In 1996, he authored an essay on polystyrene coffee lids, detailing "how intensely designed they were" and noting how the lids reveal the "whole vast machinery of modern culture". For Car and Driver, he wrote In Praise of Knobs, examining the nature of touch as a human sense, the nature of microscopic nerve behaviors, and the science of haptic feedback — learning that Audi's haptics engineers in Ingolstadt studied the sound of their dashboard switches to develop "the Audi Click". For the New York Times, he wrote about Prada's 2012 Spring/Summer 2012 collection, with shoes featuring distinctly automotive tailfins.
Writing for the Los Angeles Times, automotive journalist Dan Neil called Patton's 2004 book, Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile, "effortlessly smart and entertaining", in an industry of "authors who can take the lively subject of the automobile and inject it with Thorazine." Noted graphic designer and writer, Roger Black, said Patton "taught the New York Times to cover design. The domino effect: the rest of the media followed." Writing for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Molly F. Heintz said "from a single object, [Patton] could unfold a universe."