Mercury Cougar designer Dean Beck’s designs anchor new art exhibit

Images courtesy American Dreaming.

If Mercury was to succeed with its own pony car, greenlit after the successful launch of the Mustang, it would need an entirely new aesthetic, not just a nose job for the Mustang. Thus Mercury brought in a number of designers with fresh ideas, among them Dean Beck, whose collected works will appear for the first time at an upcoming art exhibit.

Beck, according to Jim and Cheryl Farrell in their book Ford Design Department Concepts and Showcars, 1932-1961, always wanted to become a car designer and took a chance on his dream in the mid-1950s. While stationed in San Diego with the Navy, he submitted his portfolio to the Art Center College and was granted a deferred acceptance for when his tour wrapped up.

After graduating in 1959, he went to work at Ford, where Elwood Engel recruited him for the corporate advanced studio. While he started out drafting designs for the Levacar showpiece alongside other designers, in 1960 he received a specific assignment from Engel: Investigate designs for a recreational vehicle, something versatile and able to fill multiple niches.

While Engel dubbed it the Unitron, the cab-forward, rear-engine van design came from Beck, who envisioned a number of uses from family van to cargo hauler to pickup to camper, effectively positioning it against the Chevrolet Corvan and Volkswagen Type 2. Beck’s design, however, suggested a far sleeker, lower vehicle with interesting touches like the front doors that opened from the center of the windshield.

The Unitron ultimately progressed to a fiberglass prototype with a full interior powered by a small electric motor, and by August 1961, went in front of a Ford product planning committee. Ford executives decided it didn’t warrant replacing the Econoline, which could fill many of the above roles, and the running concept was last seen in early 1963.

By that time, however, Beck had transferred to the Mercury pre-production studio, which was then putting together designs for the T-7 project, a proposed upscale Mustang (then code-named T-5). According to Aaron Severson at Ate Up With Motor, Lincoln-Mercury’s Ben Mills wanted to launch both at the same time, but Ford executives – many of them recalling the Edsel – were “still not certain there would be a market for the Mustang, much less a more upscale version.”

So the T-7 would have to wait until after Ford discarded the Cougar name for the Mustang and launched the Mustang in 1964. In the meantime, Mercury executives realized that their less successful products were little more than rebadges of corresponding Ford cars, while their more successful products had clearer identities of their own. Thus, the T-7 would share the Mustang’s underpinnings, but not its sheetmetal, and would ride on a three-inch-longer wheelbase.

John Aiken, manager of the Lincoln-Mercury advanced styling studio, and Buz Griesinger, chief designer of the T-7, generally get credit for the Mercury’s styling, but they drew from the wealth of designs that the Mercury pre-production studio had drafted a couple of years prior, including Beck’s. Though Beck certainly didn’t envision the final product fully formed, many of the elements are there in his renderings: the hidden headlamps, the more formal roofline, the wide horizontal taillamps, and particularly the crisp front fender ridge that carries through the door and kicks up at the rear window before crowning the rear quarter.

The Cougar launched in September 1966, but again Beck was on to other projects. According to the Farrells, he not only helped design the 1968-1969 Mercurys and the 1982 Lincoln Continental Mark IV (a car that shares plenty of design similarities with the Cougar), he also had a hand in the design of the 1986 Ford Taurus and the 1994 Mustang. The latter would have been one of his last projects with Ford before he retired in 1992. Beck died in 2002.

Such a lengthy career produces perhaps countless renderings, and several of Beck’s will anchor the American Dreaming: Automotive Concept Art from Detroit exhibit curated by “American Dreaming” documentarians Greg Salustro and Robert Edwards, scheduled to open this Friday at the Arthur Secunda Museum at Cleary University in Howell, Michigan. In addition to Beck’s renderings, the exhibit will also include work from GM, AMC, and Chrysler designers from the 1950s through the 1990s.

For more information on the exhibit, the artwork within or the pending documentary, visit AmericanDreamingFilm.com.