THE QUIET REVOLUTIONARY
Pushing automobile design boundaries with Marcello Gandini
Paying a visit to the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile di Torino, the Italian National Motor Museum – Mauto, as it is colloquially known – is a veritable treat. To do so when there is a special exhibition on one of the greatest Italian car designers, Marcello Gandini, and to meet the great man himself doubly so.
The son of an orchestra conductor, Marcello Gandini was born on 26 August 1938, in Turin, the birthplace of Italian motoring. Of his childhood, he says, “I am the son of a composer and director of past times. Since children never want to do what their parents did, they always try to take different roads, I too [wanted to try something new]…I dedicated myself to cars and design and this caused my father some grief. When I was four I started
playing the piano, and I had to exercise for years all the time at the piano, but I did not like it at all.”
Upon meeting the dapper 80-year-old, now troubled by a bad back, it is hard to image that he has been responsible for some of the greatest automobile designs of all time – until one talks to him, that is.
Gandini has designed supercars and saloons, utility and sports vehicles, motorcycles, pushbikes, trucks, and even helicopters. To do justice to all that this incredible designer has achieved would require a very large tome, so we will simply limit ourselves to the marvelous and amazing creations from his golden period of the late 1960s through the 1970s.
A creative revolution begins
The Carrozzeria G Bertone was founded in
1921 and was an already successful coach builder, producing bodies for Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari et al, when Gandini succeeded Giorgetto Giugiaro as chief designer in 1965. For Gandini, Bertone was a big influence on him as a designer, particularly in how he designed. Bertone designed the Citroen DS and this had a profound impact on the young designer. “I particularly like the fact that it is one of the few cars that has been constructed freely, not at all worrying about marketing, product placement, no worries about technicians involved, costs…as a matter of fact it almost caused [Citroen] to go bankrupt. But what is exceptional about this car is the fact that for once, the designer could really do what he had in mind. That is important, isn’t it?”
Gandini’s first opportunity at Bertone was the Lamborghini Miura (see accompanying story, Memories in a Miura, pp52-53), which embodied the Swinging Sixties. Gandini provided the car’s iconic chassis design and mechanicals that were built by car designers and engineers, Dellara, Stanzani and Bizzarini. Gandini styled this “shock of the new” automobile, which immediately dumbfounded – and was desired by – everyone who saw it. With the Miura, Gandini was hailed as a designer for a new era of motorcars. The boy, whose interest in all things mechanical had begun when he was given a set of Meccano as a gift, had dreamt up one of the most enduring motoring icons of the 20th century, but that was only the start.
Upending the expected
In 1969, the Bertone Runabout was presented during the Turin Motor Show. Inspired by racing speedboats of the period, it would in turn become the Fiat X1/9 and the Lancia Stratos. The previous year in Paris, the Alfa Romeo Carabo, perhaps the most extreme of all wedge-line designs pioneered by Gandini, was shown, its arrow-shaped body a mainstream element of car design ever since.
The designer would go on to produce the Lamborghini Espada, a Muira crossed with a family saloon, though unlike any family saloon that had ever been seen before, with its ground clearance of just 119cm and its 12-cylinder engine limited to “only” 240 km/h. The maestro also designed the Montreal, an Alfa Romeo that had echoes of the Miura. The Montreal prototype was presented in 1967 at Canada’s Expo Montreal. Nuccio Bertone said that it was created to satisfy “the maximum aspiration reached by man when it comes to creating cars.” Gandini’s prototype is even more glorious than the production model, preserving the lightness and proportions of the original drawings and lending support to Bertone’s lofty claims.