GIUGIARO THE GENIUS
Meet the founder and the cars that made him
In 2015, Giugiaro swapped the sprawling industrial modernism of Italdesign’s
HQ for the classical Villa Cantamerla in the hills above Moncalieri, and set up Giugiaro Architettura. He’s 80 now but still works, still rides his trials bike regularly, and looks as spry and stylish as you’d hope. Giugiaro also only speaks Italian, in a curiously compelling high register. But you listen, and you listen hard.
“Italy is a long country, with different types of weather, a mixture of different cultures, a meeting point of different experiences, so perhaps this was an advantage for the atmosphere of the post-war period... it allowed the beauty to grow,” he says, when I ask whether there was something in the water back in the day. He’s also rather more pragmatic than I’d expected, charting his journey via hard business as much as divine inspiration from the Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint to the Lamborghini Miura (which he started and Marcello Gandini completed), Maserati Ghibli and on to the original VW Golf and magnificent Fiat Panda.
“Design cannot only be an emotion, it must also express the functionality,” he insists. “From the aesthetic point of view it needs to be as interesting as possible, but you have to deal with the functionality. You can do more interesting, extreme things, but the corporate situation means that carmakers need to do things that will sell. They also copy each other, to avoid mistakes.”
Being the man he is, though, there is still a definitively romantic undercurrent. His father and grandfather were both fresco painters; he himself has just completed a huge artwork for the church in Garessio, where he was born. He’s an artist.
“Look at something like the Citroen DS: that was a unique piece, like something created by Michelangelo,” he says, arms arcing expressively. “No one copied that or could dream of doing so. I remember the first time I saw one, near Turin. It was one of the motivations for getting into automotive design; at the time I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about cars, I wanted to paint. It’s something that’s inside you, part of your subconscious and at first perhaps you don’t even know it’s there. We look at things, we have this creativity inside us, and then it just appears.”
With 74 production cars and close to 100 concepts credited to Italdesign, there’s no way they’d all fit in the company’s museum (never mind the cars he did for Bertone). Nevertheless, it provides a telling overview of trends these past 50 years. Haymakers like the original Fiat Panda and VW Golf sit alongside the DeLorean, 1993’s Bugatti EB 118, ’95’s Lamborghini Cala, 2006’s Ford Mustang study, 2013’s Parcour, and 2016’s GTZERO.