Advanced Design Center Is The Latest Addition To Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum
Birmingham, AL (October 4, 2021) – Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum is proud to announce the creation of the Advanced Design Center as part of the stunning Barber Motorsports Park complex in Birmingham, Alabama.
The Barber Advanced Design Center (BADC) was created to inspire new generations of creative thinkers. It will function as a high-tech workspace for Industrial Design exploration that includes a multimedia hub for visiting designers to collaborate with other designers from around the world.
The BADC consists of 11,000 square feet in a minimalist style driven by concrete and glass and mixed with abstract paintings and contemporary and classic mid-century-modern furniture. It’s located on the top floor of a recent expansion of the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.
The Center was designed by Brian Case, Director of the BADC, who was tasked by the museum’s founder George Barber and his executive team to propose ideas for a new educational component at the museum.
“No other design studio in the world has this kind of access to study and be inspired by machines of the past,” enthuses Case, designer of the unprecedented Motus MST V-4 motorcycle.
The BADC’s first project is a reboot of one of the most revered, exotic and rare sporting motorcycles built in the past half-century, Ducati’s stunning Supermono introduced in 1993.
The Supermono was an exceptionally light sportbike that could carve racetracks faster than any single-cylinder motorcycle. The engine featured a highly innovative design that employed a “dummy” connecting rod as a weighted rocker to quell the intense vibration emitted from high-revving Singles, allowing higher rpm for increased power.
The Supermono was also the prettiest sportbike penned by noted designer Pierre Terblanche, who is currently working along with the BADC to create a thoroughly modern version of the iconic machine. It’s a “director’s cut” of the Supermono, 30 years in the making.
“The layout and construction of the bike will be new,” Terblanche explains about the non-running but technologically fully resolved prototype.
“Advances in systems designed on CAD, the latest CNC machining, and improved Additive Rapid Prototyping (3D printing) have streamlined and sped up the design process. These technologies allow us to achieve design solutions never possible before.”
The “Mono” project will mimic its progenitor by featuring architecture for a Ducati-based single-cylinder engine, but this one sports an upgrade that will blow you away when it’s unveiled at 11:30 a.m. Central Time on Friday, October 8, 2021 at the BADC in conjunction with the Barber Vintage Festival.
For an inside look at the Ducati’s original Supermono, check out this deep dive video on its design with Pierre Terblanche and Brian Case conducted at Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.
