DESIGN DEBUT; San Francisco automotive design program plans Big Apple cameo.(News)

Byline: ANDREW LUU

Picture San Francisco-quick, what comes to mind? The Transamerica pyramid? Haight-Ashbury? Elegant Victorian mansions? Earthquakes, maybe?

Chances are, unless your thoughts wandered to cable cars or the Golden Gate Bridge, the idea of San Francisco as a center of transportation design probably never crossed your mind. But Tom Matano, the man behind the Mazda Miata and RX-7, and more recently the 6 and the RX-8, plans to change all that.

At this month's New York Auto Show (open to the public April 18-27), Matano will pull the wraps off an exhibit of automotive designs put together by students from San Francisco's Academy of Art College. The exhibit is the coming-out party for the college's five-year-old automotive design program, as well as for Matano, who took over last September as director of the college's School of Industrial Design after 29 years in the car business.

``I wanted to create something, and to help the next generation of designers,'' says Matano.

While the academy's automotive design program is a relative newcomer among well-known counterparts at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, College for Creative Studies in Detroit and the Royal College of Art in London, the circa 1929 Art College is no rookie in the design business, especially when it comes to the school's world-class architectural and interior design programs. Matano's job is to infuse some of that same ingenuity into the vehicle design curriculum, and in the process create new designs for the car industry based on the styles that ...