Hasta La Ideas

Up top: Ferry Porsche and Maximilian Hoffman

In the photo below, of the Frank-Lloyd-Wright-designed Hoffman Auto Showroom, at right you can see the large planter in the center of the rotating car platform. And atop that planter you can see a box with the now-familiar Porsche logo on it. But back then, in 1955, that logo was brand new.

You’ll recall that the Hoffman Auto Showroom was intended to sell Jaguars; so why, you ask, is it filled with Porsches during its 1955 opening? Hoffman commissioned the space in 1953, but just two years later his business arrangement with Jaguar had evaporated. This wrinkle happened close to the Showroom’s launch date; Frank Lloyd Wright had designed a leaping Jaguar statue to go onto that planter, in the center of the showroom, and Jaguar craftsmen had completed it and shipped it over to New York. After the Jaguar/Hoffman relationship evaporated, the statue was shipped back to Coventry, so the only thing it really leaped was the Atlantic. Twice.

Now back to the Porsche logo. Porsche was a logo-less company until (rumor has it) Ferry Porsche—son of company founder Ferdinand—had lunch in New York with Max Hoffman. The suspiciously colorful story, which contains at least one geographic error, goes like this:

In 1952 while dining in a New York restaurant, Max told Dr. Ferry Porsche all cars of some standing in the world have a crest. “Why not Porsche, too?” he asked. “If all you need is a badge, we can give you one, too!”

Ferry then grabbed a napkin and began to draw the crest for the state of Baden-Wurtremberg [sic] with its curved stag horns. He added a black prancing horse from Stuttgart’s coat of arms and the word PORSCHE across the top and handed it back to Max asking, “How about something like that?” With a bit of refinement and color, the famed Porsche Crest was born and today remains true to Ferry’s original sketch more than half a century ago.

(The error is the attribution of the crest to “Baden-Wurtremberg,” which is both misspelled, and the incorrect region.)

The Internet being what it is, another story has it that Hoffman penned the logo himself. The needle on my BS meter is quivering.

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