Howard's Ed Welburn Sculpts Wheels for the World
For eight-year-old Ed Welburn, the 1958 Philadelphia International Auto Show was the key to the future. His father ran an auto repair and body shop in nearby Berwyn, and Ed spent days watching him work on cars from the skeletons out.
Forty years later, the younger Welburn still spends days looking at cars, inside and out, as vice president of Design, North America at General Motors Corporation, the world's largest automaker. Welburn, only the sixth design chief in GM's history, has his stamp on every vehicle conceived by the company's more than 400 designers in 11 design studios world-wide.
He's come a long way from his childhood, when Americans were taking to the new interstate highways in record numbers in cars sporting shining chrome grills and huge fins.
"The '50s were a very car-oriented period," Welburn says, "and cars had a lot of flair. You could easily identify different brands by their looks. They all have very strong character. It was a very exciting auto industry, and I grew up in a family where there were always new cars around."
But the Auto Show was special. Designs were changing as Americans shifted to a mobile culture. Automakers were experimenting with new designs, configurations, and bold styles imitating the fighter planes of the era.
"I like a design that has flair," says Welburn. "But they all have to be contemporary. And that is what the big fins on the cars -- especially the Cadillacs -- were all about. They were built on the new technology of the time."
Welburn's mother encouraged him to read everything he could find about cars and design. By age 11, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.
"It was my dream to be a designer," he says, "and I did not think of it as a field in which there were not a lot of African-American designers."
He wrote to General Motors, "and I just let them know I was an 11-year-old kid in Berwyn, Pa., who was interested in auto design..... What courses should I take in high school, and what other preparation would I need to go to a university? And the GM design team responded."
They told Welburn he needed art courses in high school and a portfolio that could pass the competitive entrance reviews at top art schools. They also sent a list of colleges with fine arts programs that included product design. Welburn chose Howard University and specialized in sculpting.
Davis Smedley, associate professor of art and coordinator of Howard's sculpture program, says, "the car is the largest form of sculpture that most Americans own. In the process of designing cars, they are actually clay first. They make a full-sized version in clay before they finalize any design.
"There is nothing like the physical form in front of you, and being in the same space as the vehicle, to get the feel of what these cars are going to be like. It is an emotional attachment, and it therefore makes sense for GM and the other car companies to recruit from fine arts, especially the sculpture programs."
Welburn graduated in 1972 and began an uninterrupted march up GM's ranks, beginning in the Warren, Mich., design center. He moved to Oldsmobile in 1975, where he helped design the highly successful Cutlass Supreme, Cutlass Sierra, and Calais. In the mid-80s, Oldsmobile had a 1,000-horsepower engine whose capabilities it wanted to test. The driver was the legendary A.J. Foyt. The car was a newly designed Indianapolis 500 Pace Car.
"The very first sketch I drew was the one they picked," Welburn says. "Its top speed was over 300 miles per hour, and the aerodynamics had to be designed very carefully. I'm really proud of the fact that it had no wings, no spoilers, and no external aerodynamic aids to correct the shape of the body."
Welburn's philosophy melds the old with the new. The new Cadillacs -- notably the sporty CTS and ponderous Escalade SUVs -- continue the '50s use of aerodynamic styling. Now, however, it's the harder edge of the stealth jets that provide inspiration for these vehicles' more angular look.
GM still recruits graduates from art programs at Howard and at Xavier University of Louisiana, another Black institution, he says, and its collaboration at Howard now includes work with engineering students. There is a need, he believes, for more diversity in auto design.
"There are very few Blacks in design now, and that should change," he says.
Considering Welburn's 30 years of success in changing the face of some of the world's best cars, one can expect him to succeed in eventually changing the faces above the drawing boards in the design studios of the auto world.
For Others, Sometimes It Is Rocket Science
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Thursday, October 13th 2005 at 10:14AM
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