Henry de Ségur Lauve & Citroën

Henry de Ségur Lauve must have had a dream job. He was paid very well just to come up with sketches and models of americanized Citroens without having the hard work and often accompanying stress of putting the designs into production. This book is full of beautifully sketched proposals. There are many flip-out pages where large sketches that can be unfolded. His strength were side-views. There are also some perspective sketches and renderings. Many proposals would have made very nice production cars. He was working directly for Pierre Bercot and the design department probably ignored what he was doing or maybe picked out an idea here and there as they wanted to do their own thing (which is understandable). As early as 1962 he showed ideas to position the number plate under glass (like on the later SM). His contribution spanned a period of 15 years and it is interesting how the design style evolved with the years passing by. He was already quite old in the seventies but the designs were still fresh and creative. The production SM has an american touch to it and it might be because of his influence but it remains up to speculation. The text could have been a bit longer. There is not so much personal information about this mysterious designer from the USA. The gap is filled a little bit by some text and pictures about the Citroen design department. A nice book for people that are interested in car design of the past.