(Chicago) Jose arrives at the café with a tube full of his sketches and plans. He spreads out on the table his ultra-precise drawings, retouched a hundred times, corrected according to the engineers’ specifications.
I met him while taking his Uber in Chicago’s West Loop. I asked him what he did when he wasn’t driving. “Industrial designer, but I retired,” the 64-year-old with the Hispanic accent told me.
– YOU design What ?
— Oh, many things… I designed the plastic Coca-Cola bottle.”
It seemed a bit much to me. I arranged to meet him late Monday morning. The cicadas, who had emerged for the first time in 17 years in the Midwest, were playing their greatest hits for Chicago before going underground until 2041.
He hadn’t lied.
He showed me a series of originals of his works.
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
The original bottle design
Nobody knows Jose Tirso Olivares. But everyone has touched his work: the plastic Coca-Cola bottle. Such is the destiny of industrial designers.
In the late 1980s, the world’s most famous soft drink company wanted to redesign the plastic version of its bottle. It needed to give it the same personality as the glass original—or rather, the one that has been recognized worldwide since the 1920s.
There was a call for tenders. And it was Jose Tirso’s model that was chosen. At the time, he had just left the industrial design school at the University of Illinois. He was quickly hired by Kornick Lindsay, a small firm in Chicago at the time that had noticed the talent of this young Mexican graduate.
“I had already worked on several PET packages, like the French mustard bottle,” he tells me.
What you and I call plastic is actually PET, or polyethylene terephthalate for those in the know.
You can’t just copy the design of a glass bottle and make a plastic object out of it, sorry, PET. There are many technical constraints. You have to play with thicknesses, resistance, take into account the risk of explosion since the contents are under pressure…
So much so that in their first generation, plastic bottles were pretty much all the same, all products combined. Coca-Cola wanted to give its plastic version the sensuality of the glass one.
A top secret project, of course, closely monitored by the head office, which wanted to arrive before Pepsi.
“I spent at least three days a week in Atlanta. We did a lot of research on the history of the bottle, the technical possibilities, it was a big thing.”
“At school, I spent my time drawing planes in my notebooks. I don’t know why, my brother and I had a fixation on planes… He became a pilot, by the way.”
After a brief stay at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, one of the best architecture schools in Latin America, he decided to go to the United States. His father had a friend in Chicago, and he ended up here. His talent earned him a small scholarship, but he had to work a lot of jobs at the same time — illegally, because foreign students are not allowed to work.
Five years after graduating, he found himself working on an icon of American culture.
“There is no more familiar object in the world. Everyone recognizes a Coke bottle instantly. It is a piece ofAmericana. And I, a Mexican guy who didn’t even have citizenship, was going to do this. It was an incredible thing for me. How lucky. I knew what it was. They’re not just selling a drink. They’re selling an experience.”
Jose’s hands roam over the large sheets of paper as if he were petting them.
“Everything was hand-drawn back then,” he says, a hint of nostalgia in his voice.
He shows me the slight alterations imposed by the limits of the technology, the need to stick a label, the distribution of pressure, the distribution of PET thicknesses…
PHOTO YVES BOISVERT, THE PRESS
Design is an art of precision.
The bottle helped make Kornick Lindsay famous. Jose went on to design Gatorade bottles, Snapple, mayonnaise jars, sugar substitute, household cleaner, an Oral B toothbrush, and more.
“I was treated very well by Kornick Lindsay, I have to say… But also, not to brag, I was the best,” he says with a laugh.
Without ever being told, however, he sensed that not everyone at headquarters was so pleased to see a Mexican in charge of such a delicate matter.
“I thought I would get a promotion, or get a job at Coca-Cola, but it never happened. Is it because I’m Mexican? I’ll never be able to prove it…”
Ironically, it was a Swede, Alexander Samuelson, who designed the first curvy Coke bottle in 1915. It was named after a very tight skirt that was popular at the time. It was deflated in the 1920s. It was given the name “Mae West Bottle,” because it supposedly evoked the famous actress’s curves. Theorizing about the bottle’s sexual symbolism has been advanced. It has turned up in works by Dalí and, of course, Andy Warhol. The Swedish designer apparently simply wanted to evoke the shape of a cocoa bean.
Jose realized that his firm had appropriated the patent for several of the objects he had designed. “I was refused a job because when I claimed my work, the patent was in the name of the partners of the firm, I could not prove that it was mine. I was less naive after that.”
The Coke bottle, however, is in his name forever.
It doesn’t give him a cent, because the customer gets assigned the rights. If he had only a fraction of a cent per bottle sold, he would be a shareholder in Uber, not a driver.
“I’ve lived very well, and I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he says. He’s not in poverty either. He uses his talent to renovate houses he buys in Mexico. The designer is rediscovering his old dream of architecture.
An academic journal interviewed Jose 15 years ago for an article about Mexican designers in the United States, such as Javier Verdura, head of design at Tesla.
“In Mexico,” he said, “there are a lot of things you don’t have, or can’t have, so it forces you to find other ways to get where you want to go, because things aren’t structured like they are in the United States.”
How is Mexican culture expressed in a bottle? In a car? An industrial object is not a pure artistic expression. The designer steps aside, he directs his talent towards the user.
But surely, something percolates, imperceptibly, from these hands sliding on the paper to those which take the bottle, like a tactile hyphen, invisible and anonymous.