We all fantasize about creating the ultimate bike, one that combines the improbable ideas we dream up during commutes, long flights, or while lying on a beach. For most of us these chimeras remain unrealized, but occasionally someone surfaces with the drive, determination, and—above all—the resources to build a dreambike. Michael Czysz (pronounced siss) is such a man. Best known for his Architropolis practice which designs stylish hotels, bars and spas, and luxe residential projects for clients such as model Cindy Crawford and rocker Lenny Kravitz, the Portland, Ore.–based architect has never allowed his high-profile architectural career to shut out his family’s motorcycling heritage. In the postwar era, his grandfather Clarence Czysz was a top Manx Norton tuner and his father Terry followed those tiretracks by preparing racebikes for others; Czysz himself has had an amateur roadracing career, primarily on Aprilia 250 GP bikes, earning him AMA National points-scoring finishes.

Even so, contriving an avant-garde alternative to conventional two-wheeled wisdom as manifested in the MotoCzysz C1 990 was quite a step. It entailed the clean-sheet conception and construction of a 4-cylinder engine with staggered cylinder blocks and stacked contrarotating cranks positioned lengthways in a carbon fiber chassis equipped with radical front and rear suspension solutions. Czysz concocted it all with his own creative resources.



Czysz took his inspiration from John Britten. “I visited the Guggenheim Art of the Motorcycle exhibit, mainly to admire the Britten V-1000 there,” says Czysz. “After viewing the other 200 bikes covering the 100-year evolution of the motorcycle, this was something completely non-derivative, an autonomous solution by one guy to the question of what a motorcycle should be. So, the question started forming: Can someone take a clean sheet of paper to answer the question, ‘What is a motorcycle?’ It was a total epiphany.” Czysz, who has no formal training in mechanical engineering, returned home to Portland and told his wife Lisa he was going to design an American superbike; so began one year of nights spent on his clean-sheet bike design. “I personally conceptualized the entire bike,” he says. “I made drawings myself of every single section on trace paper, the medium we use in architecture, before giving them to the three guys I hired to develop these sketches into technical drawings. Using the computer was critical to designing this motor—I’m good at spatial relationships, but I couldn’t have done this bike in 2D, without the ability to move parts around on the screen to find the right place for everything. My admiration for John Britten in creating his bike without a computer is stratospheric. I don’t know how he did it.”