# Architecture of Speed

## Six Key Points

1. This long-overdue exhibition comes as a key moment: the hundredth anniversary of the scientifically-engineered automotive body design, as marked by Paul Jaray’s 1921 patent application.

2. Over the last century, society’s stance on the widespread use of private transportation has flipped: it began as an attempt, on the part of progressive intellectuals, to provide some freedom of movement to the proletariat, which was then the majority of the population. Eager to express its modernity, the Nazi regime later appropriated this idea. Today, however, we can’t dissociate the private car from the damage it inflicts on the global community. The use of private vehicles, in all their shapes and forms, is perceived as environmentally reckless, and even reactionary.

3. An explanation is needed for why Paul Jaray, despite his many fundamental technical innovations, died penniless and unknown in 1974. The reason lies in the erasure of his authorship during the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.

4. Conversely, an explanation is also needed for why the artistic avant garde, of all groups, remembered the forgotten Paul Jaray (for instance, in documenta 6) as an exemplary advocate of technological utopia.

5. Architecture of Speed provides these explanations. Paul Jaray’s theoretical work is confronted with the sheer beauty of his body designs, which will be represented in models, images, and an impressive life-sized, record-breaking car. In February 1935 on the Firenze-Mare highway it was the first automobile to reach 320 km/hr on a public road.

## Title: ARCHITECTURE OF SPEED

### Subtitle: Paul Jaray and the Shape of Necessity

6. Paul Jaray was not only the first to promote the mathematical optimisation of the car’s aerodynamics for energy efficiency and sustainability (with the low resistance of his spindle-shaped body design), but, already at the end of the 1920’s, he considered alternative forms of energy indispensible in what he saw as the coming exhaustion of fossil fuels.

## Duration:
6. November 2021–30. January 2022

## Opening hours:
10:30–12:30, 14:30–18:30

## Paul Jaray’s axiom:
“Eliminate or Streamline”

## Website:
[www.arsenale.com](/content/site-root.html)

## Press inquiries:
Bureau n  
[inga.krumme@bureau-n.de](mailto:inga.krumme@bureau-n.de)  
Naunynstrasse 38  
D-10999 Berlin  
phone: +49 30 62736102