Leonard (Len) Casillo worked for General Motors his entire career. Beginning in the Chevy studio in around 1960, he moved into the Oldsmobile studio as a designer and by the late 1960s was the Assistant Studio Chief. After a brief stint as Assistant Chief Design of the Cadillac studio, he ran the Chevrolet studio for one year before moving into his role as Studio Chief for Oldsmobile in the late 1970s. In 1983, he was named Assistant Executive Director of the Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac studios, the position he held when this oral history was conducted. Casillo’s oral history focuses quite a bit on his design approach and the overall design changes and signatures of the various studios he worked in, but mainly Oldsmobile. He discusses his early interest in cars and design and his education leading him to his first work at GM. Casillo discusses his personal design emphasis on a mechanical look and function, a clean design approach without fussiness. He talks about his role in shaping a design signature for Oldsmobile and carrying on that look throughout the year which helped give Olds cars a distinct look even through design challenges such as downsizing. He discusses in depth the design process for the Cutlass Supreme and Toronado, discussing how these were engineering focused trend setters at GM. Casillo also focuses heavily on how the demand for smaller cars, higher safety standards, and government regulations played a role in automotive design. He goes into particular detail about the challenges of downsizing in both 1977 and 1980 in particular the Olds 98. He wraps up talking about overall design trends and where he sees automotive design moving in the future.

Collection contains 3 cassettes, 8 compact discs, 3 WAV files, 3 MP3 files, and 1 PDF transcript.