Mazda Taiki interior

Dutch architecture critic Michiel van Raaij examines Mazda's bold new design language.

In the past year the Japanese carmaker Mazda has been working consistently on a new form language, and this week unveiled their most extreme 'sculpture' yet: the Mazda Furai. A car designed to take the 24h Le Mans challenge.

The design features 'crossed folds' everywhere. Normal steel plates feature only single folds, but here multiple folds are applied that cross each other diagonally. That is completely new. Unprecedented.

He goes on to talk about "maximalism" in design, and - without saying so outright - asks that we re-examine our definitions of "beauty". (At least that's what I took from it.)

Maximalism is our future. Maximalism is the end of good taste. Maximalism moves the border of good taste a little further and thereby makes room for emergent futures.

"Architects are obsessed with good taste", Crimson writes in their book 'Too blessed to be depressed'. I think that is true. But I also think that taste moves in a certain direction, in the direction of form, of maximum form. Zaha Hadid is just the beginning.

(Or, in the direction of "maximum joy", as we learn to shed the shame of Eden and rediscover the uninhibited virtues of wonder and possibility. Mazda does an excellent job demonstrating a new kind of beauty, unburdened by the type of shame which is at the root of outmoded definitions of taste.)