A car with fine lines - and nothing but

"Cars are utilitarian things," sneered the drama critic John Simon, after a writer for the Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil, won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism for a car column. "You might as well be a critic of kitchen utensils."

The installation artist Benedict Radcliffe would beg to differ. Radcliffe's florescent-orange, wire-frame rendition of the Lamborghini Countach -- one of the world's most recognizable supercars and a high point of 20th-century industrial design -- was recently on display at the Classic Car Club, in London. Fashioned out of 10-millimeter steel tubing and detailed down to the brand and make of the tires ("Pirelli P7"), the car looks like a computer-assisted design (CAD) sketch come to life.

Radcliffe told the car blog Jalopnik that his godfather used to take him to the racetrack, which is where he developed a lifelong fascination with cars. Seeing his first Lamborghini "made a lasting impression" (as it has many a boy before him). As for his design philosophy, "It's all about the economy of line -- too much steel and it becomes unsophisticated and not enough and it doesn't represent it sufficiently."

Radcliffe has been essaying these wire-frame cars for several years: His first was a Suburu Impreza, titled "Modern Japanese Classic," done up in white. Set on the street, it looks like a ghostly visitor from a video game or the product of some kind of visual trickery.

Via We Made This