Jerry Hirshberg, a passionate innovator who left a key post at General Motors’ Buick division to later oversee Nissan’s first design center outside Japan, in Southern California in the early 1980s, died Sunday at home in California. He was 80.
The cause of death was brain cancer, according to his official obituary.
Hirshberg, who crafted the 1971 Buick Riviera and the 1999 revival of the Nissan Z, was a consummate designer, creating laptops, yachts, children’s furniture and golf clubs, even a proposed makeover of the Los Angeles Times, in addition to cars and SUVs.
But it was at Nissan Design International, in the rolling hills of La Jolla, Calif., and created to give the Japanese automaker an American design foothold, where he left his biggest mark.
He was actively courted by Nissan President Takashi Ishihara, who told Hirshberg, “I want to change the flavor of our soup, and I will stay out of your kitchen.”
Under Hirshberg, the rare designer to star in an automaker’s TV commercials, Nissan forged a distinctive look for its U.S. lineup with such vehicles as the Nissan Altima, with its controversial “lozenge” styling, and the first Pathfinder and Xterra utility vehicles.
In a 2000 interview with The New York Times, upon his retirement, Hirshberg called the studio, planted in perhaps the country’s biggest automotive hotbed, his most important design.
With its standard wood shop, metal shop, modeling studios and sprawling lawn for viewing new vehicles, the design center resembled “an Ivy League campus and a Buddhist temple,” The Los Angeles Times said.
“I built a sandbox, but it’s my sandbox,” Hirshberg, who idolized Leonardo da Vinci, the famed Italian draftsman, told Automotive News in 1998. “The common wisdom of losing freshness in design is a personal one, not universal. Andrew Wyeth painted in one backyard for his entire life, yet all his paintings are vibrant. There hasn’t been a boring day here.”
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At the beginning, Hirshberg and his staff routinely wrestled with the conservative nature of the company’s Japanese executives and fiscal constraints spurred by Japan’s post-bubble economy.
“We’ve done well when there has been wide-open risk-taking — like with the Z and Xterra, when no one is doing cars like that, and the sales and marketing guys say there is no place for it,” Hirshberg told Automotive News in 2008.
While he endeavored to blaze new trails in automotive styling, he cast a critical eye on other automotive designs, openly panning the auto industry’s popular flirtation with throwback looks in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He singled out the Ford Thunderbird and Chrysler PT Cruiser, the later which he called “a pastiche of retro references.”
“Retro lost its edge when we crossed the millennial threshold,” Hirshberg told The New York Times in 2000. “Now we run the danger of cars becoming costumes on wheels.”
He once compared the first Audi TT to onetime San Diego Padre hitting sensation Tony Gwynn — “muscular and taut but bordering on the ungainly.”
Midwest roots
Gerald P. Hirshberg was born on July 1,1939, in University Heights, Ohio, near Cleveland. His father, Ed, was a postal worker, and his mother, Lill, was a housewife. He learned how to draw almost as early as he knew how to talk. His favorite drawing subjects: guns, rockets, ships, planes and cars.
Curious and precocious, he played clarinet for the Cleveland Youth Symphony and as a teenager formed a rock band called Jerry Paul & the Plebes.
An uncle, a pioneer in medical engineering, once described the magic of industrial engineering in explaining how the family’s Philco radio worked. Hirshberg was mesmerized with the lesson.
“I was captivated by the way things looked, worked, and what they produced,” Hirshberg once said. “Even as a kid, I was drawn to the marriage of art and science, and of clarity and functionality married to expressive beauty.”
He earned degrees in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University and in industrial design from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
GM talent pool
Hirshberg was hired by GM in 1963 as part of a program aimed at enriching the automaker’s studio talent by tapping designers without automotive backgrounds.
He was part of the teams that created the Pontiac GTO and Firebird and the Buick “Boattail” Riviera. He was named chief designer at Pontiac and then Buick in the 1970s.
At GM, the world’s biggest automaker at the time, colleagues openly questioned his decision to leave for a fledging Japanese automaker in 1980.
“GM was this mighty volcano, and Nissan was this little island. But I was hollering down this empty corridor at GM,” Hirshberg told Automotive News in 2008. “I thought I might be able to make a difference at Nissan.”
At Nissan, Hirshberg, a passionate yet savvy insider, secured a place for his new studio in long-range planning and himself a place on Nissan’s North American board.
With Nissan whipsawing through the 1990s, Hirshberg’s studio drew polarizing designs that were embraced by some and ridiculed by others. He designed the radical Nissan Quest minivan, a companion to the Mercury Villager, as part of a joint venture between Nissan and Ford Motor Co.
The first Pathfinder and Xterra were major successes in the showroom. But the 1992 Infiniti J30, with a slopping rear end, was ignored by consumers, although hailed by peers.
By the late ’90s, Hirshberg had secured the respect of executives in Japan. About 75 percent of the company’s U.S. lineup was handled by the studio near San Diego.
He was later offered the chance to become Nissan’s global design chief by CEO Carlos Ghosn. But Hirshberg turned the job down, saying it should go to a younger, Japanese designer.
In a 1998 book, The Creative Priority: Driving Innovative Business in the Real World, in the twilight of his career, Hirshberg chronicled how he created an environment at Nissan that sparked innovation and creativity. By then, his legend was well known. He could be a maverick manager at times. Eager to overcome a creative block in the studio, he once treated the entire design staff to a screening of The Silence of the Lambs.
Hirshberg retired in 2000, became an adviser to Nissan and devoted more time to music and painting, notably stands of bamboo, even landing an exhibition at Renato Danese’s famed New York art gallery.
“I never wanted to be interviewed later saying, ‘If you had seen what we really wanted to do … ‘ ” Hirshberg told Automotive News in 2000. “The [Altima and the J30] are highlights for us, close to pure sculpture. They may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but self-confident cars rarely are. Maybe they weren’t the best cars, but we’re still proud when we see them on the road.”