Target Targa

In the darkness of night, a light. A red Porsche 911 Targa glides along empty streets. Urban cinema. No noise, no spectacle. Only form, motion, balance. It isn’t speed that stirs the adrenaline here but the amplification of subtle sensations. Contrasts blur, colors glow in the half-light, sounds fade away. Reconciliation with the world – and again the question: Form. What is that?

The 911 has been answering that question convincingly for decades. And it’s perfectly fair to single out the Targa: the pure 911 silhouette, free of spoilers, distinctly marked by that roll bar, open roof, gentle curves, muscular flanks, a horizontal light strip at the rear. The ABCs of sports-car appreciation. It’s the idea of facing the world and its daily demands with charisma, a good dose of technical audacity and an open mind. Few cars embody that more completely than the 911 Targa. For more than sixty years it has inspired revolutionary thinking like almost no other. A story of heroic rise and fall, of catharsis across three generations, and of a triumphant comeback. That’s the Targa story.

Its history is well known, told many times. What remains is the idea behind it. The Targa stands for a solution born of necessity that became an icon. It proves that technical constraint and aesthetic ambition can drive each other to new heights – and that design sometimes outlives the reasons that first shaped it.

Only when the roll bar returned with the 991 generation did the Targa truly rediscover itself, offering brilliant proof that design really is reason No. 1 to buy. An act of engineering turned into a symbol. “Imagine meeting a childhood sweetheart again. And discovering they are now even more attractive.” That was Porsche’s slogan for the new Targa at its world premiere at the 2014 Detroit Motor Show.

One is tempted to invoke the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who described forms as the eternal, perfect archetypes of worldly things. Plato would likely have driven a Targa – and he would have appreciated the roof mechanism every bit as much as its form. This isn’t about the technical seduction of an expensive sports car. It’s about the spectacle that, in 19 seconds, reveals almost everything about the conditio humana – those distinctive traits that set us apart from other living beings. Only humans could conceive of something like this.

The twist? It’s the Targa bar story in reverse. Because the intricate engineering behind that dazzling roof-folding mechanism was developed above all to make the design possible.

→ Read the full story at
“Porsche Targa – Lived Openness”