When Acura charged Michelle Christensen with designing the exterior of the 2016 Acura NSX—the resurrection of the game-changing supercar and the brand’s halo car—she turned her gaze to nature for inspiration. “When I was younger I drew people and animals and trees,” she says. “Even in car design, though it’s mechanical, you can draw from natural things. I’m always inspired by nature, architecture, and fashion.”
Early on, Christensen had the two prerequisites necessary to become a successful automotive designer: She loved cars and could do considerable damage with her favorite tool, the number 2 pencil. As a young girl in San Jose, California, Christensen worked on classic cars with her father. “Northern California has a heavy muscle-car and hot-rod culture. I grew up around muscle cars and hot rods.” She studied the bounty in her dad’s garage. “He was a Mopar guy,” she recalls. He cycled through a Plymouth GTX, a Dodge Super Bee, and a Dodge Dart. “When I was 11 or 12 he got into hot rods and he bought a ’32 roadster.” Christensen was immersed in the classic-car scene and found her personal favorite: “My favorite car is the ’67 Chevelle. It’s simple, beautiful, and timeless.”
In school, Christensen excelled in her art courses. “I was always doodling in class,” she says. Biology, humans, and horses were her favorite subjects. “I was definitely heavy into drawing and fine art really early on, as well as the mechanics of cars.” Later, she learned about the profession of car design at community college, and as a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena she soon made her mark. She was hired by Acura in 2005.
Christensen, like many car designers, mines the outside world for inspiration. She studies images of architect Zaha Hadid’s curvaceous forms. The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan [above] is among her favorite of Hadid’s buildings. When she’s brainstorming ideas for cars, Christensen also looks at shoes, lots of shoes. To understand the relationship between the shoe and the automobile, she practices drawing feet. “From a form standpoint they are heavily dependent on proportion.”
Her first assignments at Acura were fairly pedestrian—the RDX crossover and a refresh of the RL sedan. Her role as lead exterior designer on the NSX has propelled her into a prominent position, leading a team of eight designers. She is the first woman to oversee the design of a supercar.
The stakes for the second-generation NSX were especially high, because of the original NSX’s role in establishing Acura as a serious sports-car contender. “Internally, it was a lot of pressure,” she said. She and her team had to balance the NSX’s heritage with a contemporary approach taken from the concept introduced at the 2012 Detroit auto show. “When we look at the original NSX, it was very simple and only what needed to be there was there. It was very pure design and driven by the function of the car. At least from a styling standpoint, [the new version] has the same soul. We distilled it down only to what it needs to be. It’s serving a functional purpose. It’s a supercar, so weight is important, and we had to clean it up visually.”
We reported that the NSX is made up of a cocktail of materials: aluminum, high-strength steel, and carbon fiber. “We worked closely with the guys in the wind tunnel in Ohio to make sure that every surface was tuned for aero, but also that it was in line with the styling concept: ‘interwoven dynamic.’ ”
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The process used both traditional clay-model studio work and sophisticated CAD programming to create the final NSX shape. “Even when we’re sketching, you strive for a perfect balance between analogue and digital,” Christensen says. Clearly, Christensen and her design team have struck a powerful first chord in the looks department.
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