ITALDESIGN

Giorgetto Giugiaro was born into the arts. His father and grandfather are painters and musicians.
Born in 1938 in Garessio, Italy (in the district of Cuneo) he attended technical design schools and took courses in fuger drawing at the Turin Accademia di Belle Arti (Turin Academy of Fine Arts).
He was awerded the Laurea Honoris Causa in Design by the prestigious Royal College of Art of London in 1984. The award was bestowed "in recognition of the high esteem his work in the design field is held in the United Kingdom ".
Giugiaro joined the FIAT Styling Center at the age of seventeen, where he spent four years working in close contact with Dante Giacosa.
He was appointed head of the Styling fourty Department at Carrozzeria Bertone in 1959. Among other projects he was responsible for one-offs like the Testudo, Ferrari 250 GT, Canguro and mass-produced models like the Iso Rivolta, BMW 3200 CS, Alfa Romeo 2000/2600 Sprint etc.
In 1965 Giugiaro was appointed director of the Ghia Styling and Prototype Center where pe presented four new models, including the production Maserati Ghibli and Mangusta, at the 1967 Turin Motor Show.
In 1968 Giugiaro founded Italdesign with Aldo Mantovani and Luciano Bosio.
In addition to cars an off-spring of his company, the Giugiaro Design founded in 1981 designed camers, watches, organs, crashing helmets etc. etc.
Giugiaro and his wife, Maria Teresa Serra, have two children: Fabrizio (born in 1965) and Laura (1968); he practices skiing and trial riding, loves all kinds of music and reads Plato and the classics of Greek philosophy.

And now a glimpse of the range of cars designed by him (more to come):
Bizzarrini Strada The Strada was a version of the Iso Grifo A3C, a competition version of the A3L luxury model. It was made by Giotto Bizzarrini. He was born in 1926 and between 1961 and 1965 he worked for Renzo Rivolta, whose Giugiaro designed Rivolta and Grifo models formed the basis of the Iso. In 1965 Bizzarrini parted ways with Rivolta, but reached an agreement in which he could countinue the production under his own name, calling the cars Bizzarrini Strada or GT America. It lasted until 1968.
BMW M1
The M1 was a failure from a commercial point of view: only four and a half hundred were made between 1979 and 1980. As BMW decided to enter the F1 the M1 was canned. The fiberglass bodied coupé was powered by a 3.5 litre straight six. Max speed was 260 km/h
Italdesign Nazca C2
First a story from the 1996 Geneva Show. A friend of mine was at the BMW booth when Giugiaro visited it. Giugiaro walked around and then he noticed the McLaren F1 which won the 1995 LeMans race. He made an unmistakeable gesture: anger, a sense of bitterness, dismissal. Oh, he knows so well that he had the chance to build his own supercar but McLaren was more powerful, in terms of finance so their creation became the ultimate supercar.
The Nazca C2, a more sporting version of the M12 was exhibited at the 1991 Tokyo Autoshow. The C2 is based on a V12 BMW and should be considered as the spiritual successor to the M1 (see above). The 5-liter engine was capable of 257 kW (350 bhp) and the C2 reached 100 km/h within 4 secs and had a max. speed of 300 km/h. But neither the impressive styling, nice touches nor the specifications were enough to stop McLaren.

Go back to the report!

Copyright March, 1996.