International House to Celebrate 90th BIRTHDAY for Dr. Ferdinand Porsche
Thursday, December 11, 2025
“In the beginning, I looked around and could not find the sports car of my dreams, so I decided to build it myself.” – Ferdinand Porsche
Gentlemen and fast women, start your engines with International House for an automotive night to remember, Thursday, December 11, 2025, honoring the 90th birthday of esteemed designer, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, nicknamed “Butzi” and the Porsche 911 – the greatest sports car ever to roam the Earth– which he created at age 25.
The tribute is co-hosted by Chris Carbine (Carbine Motors), Jorge Menes (spirited auto club, St. Garage and La Chicane 9 Motorsports Club), Joel Dondis, and hotel Sean Cummings (a classic air-cooled 993 man from the jump).
The happy hour tribute is 5:30 – 7:30 PM, with Loa’s James Beard nominated cocktail-champ Abigail Gullo shaking things up with inspired German cocktails and spirits.
This remarkable video explains the great meaning and purpose that is his car, and guests will enjoy the pantheon of 911 models, from the original 911 to today’s 992, parked to perfect LeMans style attention in front of the hotel.
It’s a long road from Zuffenhausen, Germany (Porsche headquarters) to New Orleans, but the most distinct and enduring city in America has more than big love for the most distinct marriage between function-and-form.
Debuting in 1963 at the Frankfurt Auto Show, this mesmerizing car transformed grown men into wide-eyed kids. The Associated Press reported, “[the 911] was mobbed and groped. Show-goers left the doors and roof smeared for a chance to sit behind the wheel.” The car was so breathtakingly original, so confident in its design, it remains hard to believe that its creator was just 25 years old.
“We owe everything to Ferdinand Porsche,” says The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning auto columnist Dan Neil, calling the 911, “the greatest sports car of all time, a fantastically well-rounded, tasteful and luxurious automobile, a flawless Olympian that just keeps getting better and faster every four years. It is the standard, the reference.” Echoed a colleague, “The sharpest knife in the drawer. It is the pinnacle of motordom from every angle.”
And yet with each re-tooling, true Porsche 911 aficionados – and they are legion (and “particular” to say the least) – tend to wax nostalgic for its inceptive glory years. “The Porsche 911 is a special case in car connoisseurship,” says Mr. Neil, “the only sports car for which enthusiasts actually pine for the older, less evolved versions of the car. There are many reasons for this. First, because the 911 has been around since 1963, there are generations of gearheads who became imprinted like ducklings on the 911's of their youth.
“Then there's reflected glory, guys wanting to buy a 911 like the one Steve McQueen drove at the beginning of ‘Le Mans’ or like the one Hurley Haywood drove at Daytona.
“And there's the weird mentality of 911 aficionados,” Mr. Neil goes on. “The older cars, with their snatchy throttles, eruptions of turbo boost and catch-me-if-you-can over-steer, constitute a kind of hazing to be endured before one can join the 911 fraternity.”
In the obituary for “F.A.” Porsche, the New York Times’s Bruce Weber more broadly described the iconoclast’s influence as being forever “entwined with the history of German automaking.”
A “remarkably simple design,” he reported, the 911 was created by a man who “prized function above all.” Today’s designers might learn from that: when one prizes function over form, form helps perform the function and beauty is the result.
Notes Cummings, “Ferdinand Porsche gave us the most admired design in motordom. Not only that, but one can surely draw a straight line of inspiration from him and Dieter Rams to the functional design we see at Apple, with then Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive among other world class talents.”
Design is often a lonely wrestle with ideas, but somehow Porsche – at only 25 years old - was comfortable alone with his thoughts. He founded the famous Porsche Design Studio, where he created eyeglasses, watches and pens. Born in 1935, he was a contemporary of Dieter Rams and a design movement that has yielded some of the world’sfinest products. "A formally harmonious product needs no decoration, it should be elevated through pure form," he once said -- a motto profoundly reflected in the lean lines of the 911 and Rams’ 10 principles.
Giving VOICE to rebels everywhere and the divine impulse that compels them to create, he mused: “Time is one of the few things man cannot influence. It gives each of us a beginning and an end. This makes us question how we use the moments in between. We all have a desire to create something that will show we were here and did something of value. Indeed, to create something timeless. The one thing that is universal is purpose. It is the essence of the human spirit to seek a reason for being. This is why functional designs are so beautiful, so calming. Function and beauty are inseparable at Porsche.”
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