You wouldn’t expect to find news on a new Jaguar car in an architectural magazine. Nor, for that matter, would you expect the newest Jaguar model to be a vehicle that’s more than sixty years old, reborn in the modern era. Yet that’s precisely where we find ourselves with the classic — and forthcoming — 2019 Jaguar D-TYPE. The catch?

In its own way, the Jaguar D-TYPE may have been one of the most important production cars of its time. Its looks were iconic, but what was going on beneath the sheet metal was revolutionary. Its monocoque, or unibody, construction is something we take for granted these days, but before the car debuted in the early 1950’s, it was unheard of.

It proved its mettle in other ways as well. A car need not be a bestseller to be respected — or even feared. And the Jaguar D-TYPE was both. 75 of an intended 100-car production run were built between 1954 and 1957. Not coincidentally, Jaguar cars owned Le Mans for three of those years, and the car routinely commands anywhere from four to ten million dollars at auction.

That puts the price of the Jaguar D-TYPE reissue — expected to be about one million dollars, according to Architectural Digest — in perspective, and takes some of the sting out. However, like other vehicles in the Jaguar Continuation Series (the Jaguar E-TYPE and Jaguar XKSS), it will be produced in limited numbers; the 25 models will, in effect, complete the 100-car target set back in 1954.

The Jaguar D-TYPE passed some of its technology on to the Jaguar E-TYPE, and some of its prizewinning DNA can be discerned in the modern Jaguar F-TYPE. In other ways, however — including the fact that this car, perhaps more than any before it, established the Jaguar brand as a force to be reckoned with — every new Jaguar model that followed can be counted as a spiritual successor. See that heritage in action at Jaguar Peabody, located at 247 Newbury St.