At 21, he was headhunted by legendary designer and car builder Nuccio Bertone to join his coachworks (as a test exercise, Bertone set him the task of drawing a new Alfa Romeo: it was so good, Bertone eventually sold it to Alfa). As for the shell, Giugiaro once described its shape as being an evolution of many cars that he had designed previously but, given present company, that's no bad thing. What young Giugiaro came up with was certainly interesting: when he took it out for a test drive in the Alps one night in 1962, it prompted calls to the police from villagers who thought it was a UFO. Or swan in, chuck some ideas about and let other people do the work? He designed some of the most important cars of our time. Giugiaro, working in a new company, GFG Style, established with his son Fabrizio, has risen to the challenge, reviving the Sixties and Seventies practice of producing mad, exciting, thought-provoking, concept cars for the new, teched-up, eco-friendly era. Similarly, the corrugated lower panels were repeated in the interior pressings, eliminating the need for trim and thus reducing costs – and it was a similar story with the flat glass and single wiper. In 1972, Lotus took the show in Turin with the Esprit concept, the first of Giugiaro's "folded paper" design cars. The Testudo launched the dramatic, low-slung sports car profile of the Sixties. When you see a beautiful woman, you think about the possibilities! “I say, ‘What has an Audi A4 got to do with your work and lifestyle?’ And they say, ‘Nothing, but if I put on clean clothes and drive an A4 into town, people think I’m a doctor or a lawyer, not a farmer.’ This is men. It featured extreme, radical straight lines and a total height of 1070mm. He is by general consent the world’s greatest living car designer, arguably the greatest to have ever lived: in a 60-year career he has designed 200 models with sales of more than 60m, and in 1999 a panel of respected international journalists and car industry leaders voted him “Car Designer of the Century”. In fact, there has been a revival both in his work and in interest among fans. Surely one of the most glamorous Aston Martins ever built, the DB4GT Jet was Giugiaro’s second show car for Bertone and made its debut at the Geneva Salon in 1961, appearing again at Turin later that year. Sure, it suffered a reputation for fragility – largely a result of its Maranello motor – but few mass-produced cars have ever matched its low-key sophistication. What they did was hard: the surfaces were uneven, and often curved, so they had to make allowances for that as they painted Madonnas, heavenly and pastoral scenes. But you will rent different kinds of car for different occasions. As a boy, Giugiaro wanted to be a painter, and he has painted portraits and landscapes all his life; on his 80th birthday he painted a series of four-metre panoramas used in a cycle of Passion Plays performed publicly in Garessio every four years. In its purest form, though, the rust-prone 'Sud – and its pretty coupé iteration, the Sprint – was a truly inspired design that Alfa would struggle to better. It’s always an illusion, but they always do it.”. The Ghibli's 4.7-litre V8 provided massive low-end torque and remarkable refinement, as well as astonishing pace: the factory claimed a top speed of 174mph. While the Maserati Boomerang, Lotus Esprit and BMW M1 may be better known today, it was this Porsche concept that gave the world its first hint of what was to come from Giugiaro's newly founded ItalDesign studio: soft '60s curves were robustly swept aside in favour of angular geometric shapes, with four gullwing doors boasting huge windows that wrapped into the roof. He was married with two kids by this point, and, despite the fantastical look of these cars, he was building a reputation for being extremely diligent, methodical and practical. The Mangusta's showstopping party piece was a pair of massive, centrally hinged clamshell doors that rose to provide access to the engine in the most extravagant possible manner. Still, exaggerated performance figures or otherwise, the car had looks to die for and, by the time the model was retired in 1974, some 412 had found buyers. The design portfolio of Giorgetto Giugiaro includes an assembly of supercars as well as several of the most popular everyday vehicles driven today. Giorgetto Giugiaro’s father, Mario, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were artists. It means pedestrians know when you’re slowing down at crossings! The chassis is said to take inspiration from buses and … Table of contents: If there is a single piece of design genius he’s most likely to be remembered for, it’s a steel rather than dough-based one. Alas, it wasn’t to be: just one look at the young Italian’s watercolours in 1955 led to a job offer from Fiat. When I ask about the sensuous shape of the Mangusta, for instance, he explains how with it he had the idea of fixing glass windows to steel using rubber seals instead of chrome, so chrome became a luxury touch, not a necessity. When Detroit Designers Drove American Car Culture, Record Players That Will Make You Love Vinyl Again, Honda's Crosstar Jazz Is Music to Our Ears, Apple AirPods Are On Sale for Black Friday, Richard Benson, Photographs by Benedict Redgrove, ESQUIRE, PART OF THE HEARST UK FASHION & BEAUTY NETWORK. With 68% of its weight over the rear wheels and low-geared steering, the handling demanded respect, but, as an automotive work of art, the mongoose was breathtaking. Giorgetto Giugiaro born 7 August 1938 is an Italian automobile designer.He has worked on supercars and popular everyday vehicles. As for the styling, that sharp-edged, dart-like profile offered an early hint at the direction Giugiaro’s work would take in the 1970s, but the long and almost impossibly low nose – combined with the squat roof and shapely tail – bestowed it with a truly timeless elegance that's still captivating today. At Bertone, he began to experiment with different looks for Alfa Romeos, concentrating, like other designers at the time, on the lights (“at the time, the engineers were discovering how to make different shapes of lights, which created new options; if you look, all the changes in design from the Sixties onwards really came from being able to put lights in different places”). I was never interested in just drawing something cool.”, Like this article? ), I wonder if Giugiaro really thinks the engineering detail is more important than the overall look, but he says no; he learned at Fiat to be careful with that idea. At the centre is the Sibylla, the four-door electric saloon car developed with Envision, a Chinese energy company. It’s easy to be dazzled by supercars but, if further proof were needed of Giugiaro’s supreme talent, look no further than Fiat’s back-to-basics baby: introduced in 1980, what at first appears to be a simple box on wheels is in fact graced with a flourish of clever minimalist details. Interestingly, he and his … Giugiaro was named Car Designer of the Century 1999 and inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2002. Look at the rear seats, like two extra passenger seats, because with an electric car the floor is flat, so you can give more room! The Ioniq 5, like the 45 concept, pays tribute to Hyundai’s first car — the Giorgetto Giugiaro-designed Pony from the mid-’70s. He talks about more possibilities: new plastics that allow so many shapes for the nose of the car, LED lights that will display different colours, patterns and images inside and out. Based on the last of 75 short-wheelbase DB4GT chassis produced by the British marque, it was unusual in featuring a steel shell in place of the aluminium bodywork usually found on Astons. Working on a successor, CEO Kurt Lotz had sent a team to the Turin Auto Show to choose the six best designs, and invite the designers in for interviews. He was given the Testudo project when General Motors commissioned Bertone to produce a more interesting, sporty version of their popular but plain Chevrolet Corvair. 1978 BMW M1: BMW’s limited-production homolgation special was the brands first M car, its first mid-engined vehicle, and a total outlier design-wise, but a looker nonetheless. It was very, very low: its headlights were embedded in the bonnet (he thinks the upward tilt of the lights is what prompted the UFO scare) and there were no doors, just a glass half-dome cockpit that hinged up to let you in. In design terms, the really clever thing was that it was still recognisably based on the Corvair. Giorgetto Giugiaro has not just designed cars, he has also worked on projects with original equipment manufacturers all over the world. As he described it in La Stampa in 1980, “The Panda is like a pair of jeans, that simple, … Giugiaro would leave Bertone after six years to join another Italian coachbuilder, Ghia, where he styled cars for DeTomaso and Maserati. People in marketing say millennials and Generation Z aren’t as concerned as their parents were with showing off material possessions, but he is sceptical about that. Last up is a machine that helped define the supercar breed just a year after the birth of the Miura chassis: with a 4.7-litre Ford V8 pumping out 305bhp, 0-60mph came up for the Mangusta in an eye-widening 5.9 secs, on the way to a top speed of 152mph. This beautiful 1972 Maserati Boomerang Coupé designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the man voted Car Designer of the Century, will be offered at Bonhams first ever sale in Chantilly on 5 September, 2015. His father, however, seeing the obvious talent, warned him off art and sent him to Turin to study rendering, costume design and technical drawing, which would teach him to work in three dimensions — something he felt would be more profitable than two. The AZTEC has a strange and fascinating history. Born in 1938, Giorgetto Giugiaro has always worked in the field of design, and especially for the automobile industry, first with Fiat, then with Bertone, and eventually with Italdesign, a company he himself founded in Moncalieri, Turin. Body design had become important to cars almost as soon as they went mass-market in the Twenties and Thirties, as manufacturers realised they could create a fashion cycle of near-constant updates without re-engineering the whole car. Powered by a free-revving, 1.2-litre flat-four and equipped with disc brakes all round, the Alfa offered class-leading dynamics – but it was Giugiaro’s timeless styling that made it one of the prettiest small family cars of its day. He erupts in laughter at this, as he often does telling earthy stories about the industry; he might read Umberto Eco and say he’d like to have been a fashion designer, but he obviously knows his way round the shop floor and isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. 1988 Italdesign AZTEC Concept Car designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro This model debuted at the Turin show as an innovative show car and the original prototype is now preserved eternally as a part of the Giugiaro Collection. Is there a secret guy who designed some of Giugiaro's great cars like the Bizzarrini Strada? We drive away from the HQ, through wooded hills to the GFG Style offices, where a collection of his cars sit glistening in a showroom. Welcome to Carstyling! Progressivement, Giorgetto Giugiaro partage la marche de l’entreprise avec son fils Fabrizio Giugiaro. Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. 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