The Citroën H-Van Is One Of The Best Examples Of Unstyling

There’s a sort of strange phenomenon in the world of automotive design, one that seems a bit like a paradox. It’s the realization that sometimes, the best designs aren’t designed at all, they just sort of happen, as a byproduct of a car’s engineering and the job it is intended to do. It’s sort of like the Bauhausian concept of form follows function, but perhaps even taken to a greater extreme than what those Bauhaus kids were doing. The paradox is that it often takes a good car designer to realize this, and to sort of be a guide to make sure no misguided attempts at “design” actually happen. It’s design by not designing, but that itself is a form of design.

I told you it was kind of a paradox.

One of the best – though by no means only – examples of this is the Citroën H-Van. These vans were built between 1947 and 1981 and featured a construction philosophy inspired by aircraft like the Junkers and the Ford Tri-Motor, where flat panels were heavily corrugated to add strength without adding weight. They were extremely straightforward vehicles, with a unibody design and front-wheel drive layout that provided a huge amount of usable space. I mean, just look at the thing:

If you consider the overall length of the vehicle and how much is actually usable for people or cargo, it’s pretty damn impressive. This is clearly a machine made to accomplish a task, the task of moving crap around, and it achieves that incredibly well. And, yes, it appears that precisely zero effort has been devoted to “styling” the H-Van, to a degree that I find extremely impressive.

You know how some car brochures include detail shots of some of the interesting design elements of a car? This brochure does the same thing, but all of the details picked are just utilitarian parts bolted without ceremony to the van: handles, lights, that sort of thing. There’s no attempt to “design” here:

I love all of this so very much. Look at that headlight, for example. They just took the same units used on the 2CV, made the most straightforward bracket they could, and bolted it on. Done. The only styling that happened there was that someone made sure they were facing forward before knocking off for lunch.

This crude diagram of the H-Van really isn’t that far from a full portrait of the van. This is pretty much it!

Look at this incredible serviceability! That whole drivetrain just rolls right out the front!

There’s zero pretention here, no attempt to make this into something it’s not. It’s just a tool, and however this particular tool ends up looking in order to do its job is just how it is. And then, somehow, the end result becomes something that actually is stylish, is a design icon, because that’s how things work, sometimes.

There were pickup and chassis-cab versions of the H-Vans, and they were variations that were created via subtraction: body panels were removed until you ended up with a pickup, and then one more was yanked off the back of the cab, and boom, you now have a chassis-cab version. Note that rear cab panel up there, and how there are two stampings for the rear window (I guess to accommodate LHD and RHD versions) but only one gets to actually have a glass window.

Aside from the Citroën chevrons, is anything on this thing just there for ornament? I did hear one of those rectangular air-intake slots on the hood is a dummy, to keep things symmetrical and balance the heater air-intake slot, but I think that’s it.

It’s perfect as it is. And, perversely, I think this lack of design is actually a testimony to good design, and the surprisingly hard part of design that is knowing when to not do a single thing.