The art of the Escort

Whoever would have thought that a Ford Escort - the classic Eighties boyracer - could become a design statement?

Visitors to London's Design Museum may yet be persuaded that the humble hatchback has risen to the heights of a cult icon when they see a moulded polyurethane foam replica of a 1985 model sitting in a glass tank on the museum's Thames-side site in September.

At first glimpse, it seems as if this prosaic vehicle is dipped in aspic and preserved for posterity. But a glance through the car's open doors tells another story. The interior resembles an upholstered cocoon with a double sofabed and a cushion that flips over for use as a table. The installation's designer, Jerszy Seymour, believes that the car is big enough to sleep, eat and live inside.

His faux-Ford Escort is part of the Design Museum's Living in a Tank exhibition, a year-long series of installations in which designers explore ways of living in tiny urban homes. At a time when increasing numbers of Londoners are living alone in ever-smaller urban spaces, the installation has much to say about how to make compact living comfortable.

Seymour, 33, who graduated in industrial design at London's Royal College of Art and now works in Milan, describes this experimental piece as a "mini architectural project". But there's no need to splash out £10,000 on this one-off collector's item to plug into the underlying message that - for all the jokes about it - a Ford Escort connects with our lives more closely than many of the cult designer objects featured in television advertisements and glossy lifestyle magazines.

"It's about quality of life," says Seymour. "It's saying that you don't have to fill your home with designer hardware such as trendy white sofas and high-tech TVs. There's another way of living that centres on meeting friends, eating meals, making love and generally living life in a more dynamic way than sitting on your perfect white sofa watching DVDs on your home cinema." So why choose a Ford Escort to convey this message? "This car has the same significance around the whole world," says Seymour. "It connects with real life - the lowlife - which is why I've called it Bonnie & Clyde. If that pair of bank-robbing lovers had lived in the Eighties, I'm sure they'd have driven a souped-up Ford Escort and probably lived in it as well."

An Escort is also the only car he has ever owned. The irony is that Seymour has had to ruin it by making the cast to create the foam replica.

Nor is Bonnie & Clyde the only motor-inspired design he has created. His Freewheeling Franklin - a table on wheels operated by remote control - employs the mechanism from a remote-control Japanese Tamiya model car.

Are further car-inspired designs in the pipeline? "Motorbikes next," says Seymour, although it's unlikely his two-wheeled creation will offer bijou accommodaton.

Living In a Tank, a series of installations at the Design Museum, runs for a year from 20 September. Bonnie & Clyde will be on show until 19 November. Call 020 7940 8790. www.designmuseum.org. Freewheeling Franklin costs £1,200 in a numbered limited edition via the website www.gosputnik.com

The history of the Escort