Architects and designers have long been entranced with the dynamic potential of the automobile. From Edwin Lutyens to Renzo Piano, many have attempted to create their own cars – with mixed success. There have been a good number of speed freaks among their ranks too: Frank Lloyd Wright had to stop driving after too many near-misses, while one of Le Corbusier’s most treasured memories was hurtling around Fiat’s rooftop test track in Turin in an open-top Balilla Sport. Here’s a round-up of some creatives and their relationship to four wheels.

Norman Foster
Like many architects, Foster has been fascinated by new possibilities for the internal space of cars. Among Foster’s extensive car collection is a recreation of one of Buckminster Fuller’s 1930s Dymaxions, a strange “wingless plane” which unfortunately proved fatally unstable at speed.

Marc Newson
Marc Newson’s designs have often been inspired by the automotive world, perhaps most notably with his Orgone chair, which evokes the work of the great Italian coach builders of the 1950s and 1960s. But in 1999, Newson designed a complete car, the funky, orange, composite-bodied 1999 Ford 021C concept. Built by Ghia in Italy, it is one of the great “what-ifs” of recent car design history.

Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier often included his beloved Voisin (designed with the help of an architect, André Telmont) in photographs of his buildings. Inspired by a visit to the Ford plant in Detroit, Le Corbusier believed that there was much for architects to learn from automotive production lines. His 1936 sketches for his own car design – the simple, rear-engined, flat-floored Voiture Minimum, sadly never made – still look modern today.

Giò Ponti
Giò Ponti designed a car in 1953 based on the measurements of an Alfa Romeo chassis. With its large glasshouse and plunging bonnet, the Linea Diamante, was decades ahead of its time. More a set of design principles than a car, its influence on vehicles of the 1970s – such as the Fiat 127, Volvo 340 and Saab 99 – is clear.

Renzo Piano
As president of independent research institute, Idea, Piano oversaw the design of the highly influential vss experimental car, which did eventually evolve into the production Fiat Tipo.

Edwin Lutyens
Edwin Lutyens is perhaps the last architect one would associate with the automobile. But in the 1920s he came up with an idea for a royal state limousine which blended 19th-century carriage design with modern pneumatic tyres. Thankfully it was never built.

Frank Lloyd Wright
From his first car – a 1910 Stoddard-Dayton – onwards, Frank Lloyd Wright insisted on customising the bodies for his cars (usually painted Cherokee Red) and was a big fan of convertibles. His favourite brand was the now-defunct Cord, though he also loved the Lincoln Continental and made drawings, never realised, for his own car: a wildly impractical, futuristic vehicle he called the Road Machine, which seated three abreast. 

Walter Gropius
Bauhaus director Walter Gropius collaborated with Adler in Frankfurt for four years in the 1930s. His creations were rather stolid but he did design one of the first cars whose seats could fold into a bed – echoing a common obsession of the “car-chitects” to create houses on wheels.