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Dec 15 - Dec 22,2002 |
Harmony Of Grace
Giorgetto Giugiaro car designs among world's best
By Mark Curtis
Originally Published: 2002-12-08
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Maserati Spyder
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Few things say "la dolce vita" better than driving a sportscar on an open road and the Italian design industry, with names such as Fiat and Alfa Romeo, is legendary for having provided some of the world's most desirable cars. There is perhaps no greater Italian car design legend than Giorgetto Giugiaro, who exhibited a prodigious talent as a young man in the 1950s and is still going strong today.
Giugiaro's prolific output in the 1960s included classics like the Fiat 850 Spider and the Maserati Ghibli. In the 1970s and 80s he furthered his reputation with the commercially successful utilitarian designs of the first generation Volkswagen Golf and the Fiat Panda. Thirty million vehicles have been built based on his designs. His most recent work includes the design of the new Maserati Spyder, which the manufacturer heralds for "Giugiaro's muscular yet harmonious Italian styling."
Davide Tonizzo, a Toronto industrial designer who worked as a car interiors designer for Fiat and Lancia during a three-year stint in Italy, says Giugiaro was one of his early design heroes. "He is a great designer because he is a master of proportion," says Tonizzo, whose aerodynamic cargo van design for truck body manufacturer Unicell is increasingly ubiquitous on Toronto streets. "(Giugiaro's) design technique is of the classic Italian school," says the Toronto designer. "I believe it is this classic methodology which gave Giugiaro's cars such grace because (he was) working on one honest design concept from the beginning and using (his) resources to perfect it, rather than trying to build an unrealistic concept onto an engineered chassis."
Giugiaro and engineering partner Aldo Mantovani established their Italdesign studio in Turin in 1968. In addition to his vehicle designs, Giugiaro has also created consumer products for companies such as Nikon and Seiko. He aspired to be a painter, like his father and grandfather, but opted for a more practical design career. The perfectionist Giugiaro described his design approach in an interview last year: "My philosophy in cars and objects is that the form should be honest. I strive for harmony in complexity." He has designed more than 100 production cars in the past 30 years and the large and well-staffed Italdesign studio generates an equal amount of prototypes each year.
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