The Legendary Designs of Giorgetto Giugiaro

You know the cars, the DeLorean, the M1, the Golf, now meet their designer and automotive legend, Giorgetto Giugiaro.

Who Is Giorgetto Giugiaro?

Industrial design requires the blending of form and function. Designers must temper the purely artistic to account for the inevitable exactitude of engineering and manufacturing. That the automotive designs of Giorgetto Giugiaro look supremely indulgent, even outlandish while being deeply practical is a testament to his great skill as a designer.

While you may not be able to pronounce his name, you know his work. Giorgetto Giugiaro is, by most accounts, the greatest car designer of all time. Among his prolific accomplishments, numbering some 200 cars, are the iconic DeLorean DMC-12, the singular BMW M1, along with more practical fare like the Volkswagen Golf and Fiat Panda. It is hard to overstate Giugiaro’s influence on automotive design. His work has inspired generations of designers for more than sixty years. Contemporary designs continue to pay homage to his work, like the recent Hyundai N Vision 74 concept.

Below we will sketch Giugiaro’s over sixty-year career and highlight some of his most famous designs.

From Wizkid to Wizened Pro

Born in 1938 in Garessio, Italy, Giorgetto Giugiaro hails from a family of artists. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all artists and Giorgetto had initially sought to follow in the family tradition. His father, however, suggested he consider design work. This nudge toward the practical would have an impression on Giugiaro’s work.

As a teenager, Giugiaro studied design and art in Turin, Italy. It was there, during a school exhibition, that his work was noticed by Fiat Technical Director Dante Giacosa who hired Giugiaro at the tender age of 17. Despite his youth, Giugiaro was a prodigious talent with a depth of technical acumen.

Four years later, while attending the Turin Auto Show, Nuccio Bertone saw some of Giugiaro’s sketches and lured him away from Fiat to work for his design house. There, Giugiaro’s work included the designs for the Fiat 850, Alfa Romeo 2000 and 2600 Sprint, and the Chevrolet Corvair Testudo (Latin for turtle) among many other cars. In 1965, Giugiaro joined the Italian design house Ghia. There he created the designs for the De Tomaso Mangusta and the Maserati Ghibli.

After his brief stint at Ghia, Giugiaro set out on his own, founding Italdesign with engineer Aldo Mantovani in 1967. It was at his own firm that Giugiaro’s most famous designs germinated. Drawing from Japanese origami, Giugiaro’s work made striking use of sharp angles and long flat planes. Giugiaro grounded these revolutionary looks with a good dose of practical engineering. The sharp creases allowed for easily welding panels together, simultaneously reducing the complexity of execution and lowering costs. (This cost-reduction element was key to Giugiaro’s design of the DeLorean DMC-12 and inspired the radical look of Tesla’s ever-forthcoming Cybertruck.)

Icons of Italdesign

From the next fifty years, Giugiaro and Italdesign worked with nearly every major automaker (with the exception of Honda) on dozens of designs for concepts and hundreds of production cars. The list of notable vehicles is long, and we will highlight a few of the most exceptional below, but here is a brief rundown. Giugiaro penned designs for BMW, Audi, and Alfa Romeo. He created concepts for Ford, Porsche, and Bugatti. His work spanned the most outrageous of wedge-shaped sports cars to innumerable production cars from the likes of Volkswagen, Daewoo, SEAT, Fiat, and more. Most enduring of his works are the wedge-shaped concept designs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, like the Alfa Romeo Iguana and Maserati Boomerang. It is impossible to envision much of the supercar segment thereafter, including today’s Lamborghinis, without Giugiaro’s influence.

In 2010, Volkswagen Group bought a large stake in Italdesign. Giugiaro left the company he founded a few years later, in 2015 to start another small design company with his son Fabrizio, GFG Style, where he continues to work today. Giorgetto Giugiaro was named the Designer of the Century in 1999 and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2002.

Decades of Provocative Designs

1962 Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Speciale by Bertone

While it was Pinin Farina that was Ferrari’s go-to coachbuilder for the 250 GT cars, Giugiaro did get the chance to pen the design for Nuccio Bertone’s specially ordered, personal 250 GT Berlinetta.

1966 Maserati Ghibli

The original Maserati Ghibli is one of the most beautiful grand tourers ever created, and it owes its elegant silhouette to Giorgetto Giugiaro. Though his time at Ghia was brief, Giugiaro was able to further his design when he and Italdesign received the commission for the Ghibli’s successor, the Maserati Bora.

1966 De Tomaso Mangusta  

The other of Giugiaro’s major Ghia designs was the De Tomaso Mangusta, predecessor to the Pantera. The Mangusta name is Italian for Mongoose, a jab at Carroll Shelby and his AC Cobra against whom Alejandro De Tomaso held a grudge over a failed business deal.

1968 Alfa Romeo Iguana Concept

Debuting at the Turin Auto Show in 1968, the Alfa Romeo Iguana concept car was one of Giugiaro’s early wedge designs. Though painted in gray-metal flake, the car’s body was done in fiberglass.

1972 Maserati Boomerang Concept

The Maserati Boomerang concept offers an even more acute angle than the Iguana and its design echoed through many of Giugiaro’s later designs.

1974 Volkswagen Golf

Though known best for his ostentatious sports cars, Giugiaro and Italdesign worked on some of Volkswagens most important and memorable cars from the 1970s. Giugiaro penned not only the proletarian Passat and Golf but also the Scirocco and Jetta.

1976 Lotus Esprit

The Series 1 Lotus Esprit added to Colin Chapman’s simplicity and lightness a dose of Giugiaro’s signature design cues for a bantam weight wedge reminiscent of the De Tomaso Mangusta.

1977 BMW M1

The M1 was the first of BMW’s legendary M-line and perhaps never looked better than Giugiaro’s initial design. Though outside of what was (and is) typical of BMW, the M1 is one of their best-looking cars ever and one of our favorite iterations of their iconic kidney grille.

1980 Fiat Panda

The Fiat Panda was another of Giugiaro’s mainstream designs. As with the Golf, Giugiaro is subtle and deft, managing to have the Panda resemble a crisply ironed shirt rather than a cardboard box.

1981 DeLorean DMC-12

When John DeLorean wanted to take on GM and the rest of Detroit with his ambitious (eventually too ambitious) new sports car, there was just one choice for a designer. Giugiaro leveraged many of his best ideas for what has been his most indelible design in the DMC-12. (For more on the DeLorean’s story, click here.)

2018 Sibylla GG80 Concept

Giugiaro continues his work to this day. His latest work includes the Sibylla GG80 concept for Chinese EV (Electric Vehicle) maker Envision and the Kangaroo all-terrain EV concept.

Not Just Cars

Before we close, it should be noted that Giorgetto Giugiaro has not limited himself to automotive designs. He has done design work for Seiko watches, Nikon cameras, Beretta firearms, motorcycle makers like Ducati, and even the design of the organ at the Cathedral in Lausanne on Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

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