After I put the conversion kit product together, just the first prototypes, I gave a cruzbike to a friend of mine to ride. I have connected with this person since we found a common passion in architecture and geometry, what, now 27 years ago. He has a brilliant ability to somehow know what he is looking at. Whether it is architecture, painting, or antiques, he has an uncanny way of zooming right in on the good stuff, swiftly sorting the wheat from the charf, and telling what good about it.
Naturally he had tracked each challenge and solution in developing the front triangle. But what he said about the whole bike, and what I then realised was true, was that the seat was actually the best part.
In designing the seat I reasoned that it should be absolutely minimal in area so that it would not depart too far from the language of the sleek slender bicycle frame. I reasoned that if the surface area was half that of a mesh seat, then the air flow over the rest of the body would improve cooling. I also developed the shape as a comound curve - if you draw a curve on a flat sheet and then bend along that arc, you create two warped surfaces meeting on this curve. Because the seat is based on this principle it was possible to hand make the original prototypes and so evolve the correct shape - and the compound curve principle helps ensure a nice aesthetic in the final form.
