Luigi Colani
Radical, maverick designer whose curvaceous, streamlined visions inspired the likes of Zaha Hadid
LUIGI COLANI, who has died aged 91, was a renowned designer who embraced radical thinking and influenced European product design. Many designers saw him as genius with remarkable future-vision. Others, notably those enmeshed in the world of fixed, corporate design rules, labelled him as a man with too many fanciful thoughts.
Colani was the man behind the emergence of a new “design language” movement. This reshaping of design was framed across a career encompassing more than 5,000 designs. More than 100 German household products carried the Colani design signature by 1978.
He was the pioneer designer of the world’s first streamlined trucks and heavy goods vehicles in 1971 but, as Colani declared: “Nobody took any notice.” Colani’s all-plastic, highly streamlined fuel-efficient airliner design of 1976 accurately predated current designs from Airbus and Boeing by three decades.
The leading British industrial designer Ross Lovegrove cites Colani as of significant influence and of Colani’s works as having prescient environmental relevance. Zaha Hadid was a Colani design disciple, her architecture being influenced by Colani’s philosophy of curves, structure and scale.
Colani’s famous “curved” range of household and bathroom furniture manufactured by Villeroy and Bosch defined his emergence in the field in the 1970s and earned him a fortune.
One of Colani’s greatest successes came when he shaped the Canon T90 camera in the 1980s. He designed a range of personal computers for Scios and for Vobis in the 1990s.
His designer’s eye knew no limitations and he designed a curvaceous grand piano for the piano manufacturer Schimmel. Colani also designed headphones for Sony in the 1990s.
Proof of Colani’s diverse design talent saw him create clothes and uniforms: Swissair used Colanidesigned crew uniforms, and in 2004 he redesigned the uniform of the German Police Force.
Luigi Colani’s record of massproduction design success has perhaps been somewhat overshadowed in some minds by his maverick one-off prototypes and his use of explicit erotic themes in his works. By his own admission he designed things for the sake of design, not for commercial gain. He also stated that “European design must be completely redone.”
Colani liked curves, not straight lines, preferring “biodynamic” designs – he thought that designers should look to nature for design solutions: birds, sea creatures and the female form all inspired him to create his radical, organic designs.
Of his use of ellipsoid design forms Colani said: “The world is round. Nature is round. The curved form is both structurally and aerodynamically the most efficient. We are aroused by rounded forms. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei’s philosophy: my world is also round.”
Usually swathed in all-white clothes, the swarthy, mustachioed, cigarsmoking Colani was of dramatic looks, long dark hair and great presence. His elegant designs stemmed from a studio littered with chaotic piles of materials and plastic prototypes.
Having achieved recognition and financial independence, he refused to be part of the corporate world. If company men did not approve of his revolutionary ideas, he neither cared nor compromised: the next project was always waiting.
Luigi Colani, one of four children, was born as Lutz Colani in Berlin on August 2 1928 to a Swiss father who was a filmset designer. His mother, a theatre worker, was of Polish descent.
The multilingual young Colani, whose teenage years took in wartime Berlin, dropped out of art school there and moved to France in 1949, working as a coal miner, jobbing illustrator and advertising artist.
He then studied design at the L’école Polytechnic in Paris, and the Sorbonne. He worked for Renault, and
Simca, helping construct Simca’s first glass-fibre car.
Becoming fascinated by aerodynamics he went to California, where he worked for Mcdonnell Douglas, then returned to Europe in order to build a base in Berlin. He started to design and build his own one-off prototype car bodies and won a Golden Rose design award for an interpretation of a Fiat for the future.
His big break came in Paris in 1960 when he designed a radical new women’s shoe for Jourdan. The design won a national prize and exerted a considerable influence on French shoe design for a decade.
Luigi Colani produced his own Colani GT car design as a self-build kit car of radical shape. At this time he fell in love with plastics.
Like many car designers, he realised that the Italian dominance of car design meant that his non-italian name might hold him back. He changed his name from Lutz to Luigi and it proved to be a good decision. Cars, designs and prototypes for Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Volkswagen and BMW all came along.
As early as 1968 Colani was the designer of the world’s first plastic cutlery for airline use. He created a famous teapot design for the German porcelain maker Rosenthal.
Buoyed up with commissions and income (Thyssen paid him more than £1 million a year as design consultant), Colani purchased and restored the moated 14th century Schloss Harkotten at Sassenberg in North Rhine Westphalia. It became his base and design studio – and had no telephone.
In the 1980s, fascinated by Japanese culture, he relocated to Tokyo and set up his Japanese design centre, working with major industrial concerns on product designs; he took up a teaching job while he was there.
In 2007 a Colani exhibition was held at the Design Museum London. In 2011 he had a major exhibition in Munich. Colani’s fame in Europe was confirmed, but it was in Asia that his later life was based.
The Colani Chinese design centre resulted from a government invitation to create a design base in Shanghai. Living in China and increasingly interested in new materials and architecture, Colani received a professorship from Tongji University, where he insisted that young designers put down their computers and electronic pads and draw their designs on paper – then build them as models, just as he had at his father’s insistence as child in Berlin.
Few designers knew that it was Colani who sculpted the figures of athletes displayed at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In China, he embraced bamboo as a key environmental material for the future.
Luigi Colani is survived by his partner Ya Zhen Zhao, his son Solon, who is also a designer, in Berlin, and another child from an earlier relationship.