The inspiration for the upcoming A Very Wolfsonian Weekend Gala -- which includes visits to classic-car museums, a talk by renowned car designer Chris Bangle and Mitchell ``Micky'' Wolfson's 70th birthday party -- began, of course, with the art of design at the Wolfsonian-FIU on Miami Beach, founded by Wolfson.

And the Car World weekend was directly inspired by the museum's current exhibition, Styled for the Road: The Art of Automobile Design, 1908-1948, on view through March 14. At its opening, Fred Sharf of the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection of American Automobile Art took in the array of images loaned from his collection with chief curator Marianne Lamonaca, the basis of the design drawings that comprise the show, drawings that serve as totemic emblems of this country's love for the internal combustion engine.

The exhibition traces the development of cars, roadways, gas stations and the pull of advertising: even in the 1920s, General Motors had hit on the idea of planned obsolescence, and the impulse to sell ever-more glittering automobiles every year became a national imperative. To that end, Sharf's collection includes a 1934 design drawing for a ``Streamlined Convertible with Dorsal Fin,'' all teardrop-shaped fender covers and curved aeronautical windshield.

In another area of the museum's galleries a 1946 drawing for a ``Futuristic Limousine'' with wing-like pontoon fenders is displayed alongside a drawing for a ``Gasco Service Station.'' And part of the ceiling in the main galleries makes for a perfect setting for automobile culture: the museum acquired the pecky-cypress ceilings from the old S.A. Ryan Buick showroom in downtown Miami, with stylized gears and cogs worked into the design of the panels.

To Sharf, of Palm Beach, the Wolfsonian-FIU exhibition represents the inescapable fact that ``car culture defines this city, and America itself.''

INDUSTRIAL AGE

The Wolfsonian has always been about mankind's uneasy embrace of the industrial age, and the pieces on display are a remarkable expression of longing for the transformations that technology may or may not bring: John Rickett's 1940 ``Futuristic View of Intercity Transportation,'' as serene and ordered as an ant colony, is a long leap from Benny Chan's aerial photographs of the living hell that is modern Los Angeles traffic that adorn the museum's lobby. Another piece from the permanent collection, a 1935 drawing of a ``Heinz 57 Comet Car'' -- a Brave-New-World prototype designed by Rust Heinz, grandson of Henry John Heinz -- is all about the promises of speed and the future.

The show also includes an illustration for a 1920 Locomobile and a 1936 Lincoln Zephyr that conveys the pure status symbolism of cars, along with a racy 1930s Adam and Eve-revisited French car ad that's eerily modern.

The Very Wolfsonian Weekend should be, well, very Wolfsonian, and commences Friday evening at The Creative Workshop, a classic-car restoration facility housed in a 1936 Dade County pine barn in Dania Beach. Hosted by owners Kim and Jason Wenig, the party will feature such conversational openers as a Ghia-bodied Abarth, the Stanguellini Bialbero and a Sport Speciale. For Jason Wenig, these cars are gems of intelligence.

``What we call barn finds, rare hand-built cars that have been discovered after years of neglect, are the holy grail of this business,'' he says. ``Some collectors think of cars like this the way that women think of shoes: they change cars every day to suit their mood. Cars define who we are, and we define ourselves through our cars.''

On Saturday night, Chris Bangle -- former chief of design for the BMW Group -- will speak on the notion of ``Art and Cars: Cars As Art'' at Braman Motors on Biscayne Boulevard. In an era when retro-car design is all the rage, the American-born Bangle set out to take BMW past the unornamented era associated with the lingering rigors of Bauhaus. His speeches are seriously ecumenical, incorporating Frank Gehry, Nokia cell phones, the sculpture of Umberto Boccioni and the ``punctuated equilibrium'' evolutionary theories of Stephen Jay Gould. This is not ordinary car talk.

FIELD TRIPS

After Bangle's presentation, the troops will move on to cocktails at the Bacardi Building Plaza, that symbol of all that is good and mid-century modern in Miami, with a return to Braman Motors for a gala dinner in honor of Micky Wolfson. The weekend wraps up on Nov. 15 with afternoon visits to two car collections, the Fort Lauderdale Antique Car Museum -- home to some 32 Packards -- and The Dauer Museum of Classic Cars in Sunrise.

At the latter, Edward Dauer has assembled everything from 1941 Cadillacs to 2009 Dodge Challengers but remains partial to the epoch of pure power.

``The big cars of the 1950s and early 1960s, all that chrome and big fins, are a symbol of American industrial might and greatness, our worldwide supremacy in manufacturing and technological innovation that was supposed to last for generations,'' he says. ``They're American propaganda machines, built to impress the world. We'll never get back to that era, but great American cars are still pretty impressive.''

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