Creation, Italian-Style

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Giorgetto Giugiaro can tackle anything from a camera to a car

Industrial design, in the Italian manner, has long meant sophisticated elegance. Products like Ettore Sottsass Jr.'s Olivetti Valentine typewriter, Marco Zanuso's Aurora fountain pen or Mario Bellini's Chiara lamp are displayed in modern art museums to exemplify beauty.

Giorgetto Giugiaro, 43, has added an additional dimension to smart looks: ingenious practicality for both consumer and manufacturer. He wants his products not only to look better than the competition but also to work better. Many critics see in Giugiaro the successor to Raymond Loewy (Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives, Pepsodent toothpaste packaging) as the world's leading industrial designer. When Giugiaro was 21, admiring countrymen were already calling him "Geniaccio" (Little Genius).

Giugiaro rose to early fame with his automobile designs, notably the Alfa Romeo Giulia GT and the first post-Bug Volkswagens. His firm, Ital Design, with some 200 employees, has created such diverse products as Necchi electronic sewing machines, a Nikon camera, Nikon sunglasses, the Isuzu Piazza auto, an electric organ, ski bindings, buses, cigarette lighters and a complete set of street furniture for the city of Turin--trash cans, street signs, lights and tram stations. Constantly adding to his list of international clients, Giugiaro expects to have an exploratory meeting soon with General Motors to talk about designing a car. Says he: "Ideas are our export."

Giugiaro made his first big impression on the American public in 1976 when New York's Museum of Modern Art held a design competition for a highly maneuverable taxi that people could get in and out of easily. Giugiaro submitted a plan for a compact, five-passenger Alfa Romeo with sliding doors wide enough to admit a wheelchair. It cost less than the average American cab, and at the time everyone thought it was a great idea. It still is, but unfortunately, no one in the U.S. wants to manufacture it.

Giugiaro is one of the few designers who have realized Walter Gropius' 63-year-old Bauhaus dream of a marriage between art and technology. At Gropius' German Bauhaus school of design, there was to be no distinction between engineering and styling, between the structure of a building or object and its decoration, between form and function. But the marriage was rarely consummated, and "functional design" more often than not has become just another style that sometimes obstructs practical function. In industrial design, particularly in America, the engineers may call the shots. Designers are brought in to package the product for sales appeal. Says Italian-born American Designer Massimo Vignelli: "The good thing about design in Italy is that there are no marketing people around to tell you what you can do or cannot do with your designs, which really is the condition, sine qua non, for getting good design on the streets."

This is the way things work at Ital Design. Giugiaro maintains a large engineering staff to solve functional and production problems as the design evolves. One example of this comprehensive approach, cited by Giugiaro, is the door of his Fiat Panda. The recessed door hinges are covered with plates on the outside. Giugiaro's hinges make it unnecessary for an assembler to work on the cramped inside of an auto--the outside hinges can be installed with ease.

Giugiaro applies the same basic principles to all types of products. He creates paper, clay or metal prototypes, and is prepared to furnish layouts of the product's assembly line, drawings for the necessary tools and estimates of production costs down to the last lira, mark or yen.

When Ital Design was retained to develop Nikon's F3 35-mm camera, Giugiaro looked beyond styling to make the most of the camera's improved technology. The motor drive attaches to the bottom of the camera, providing a low center of gravity that offsets the weight of a projecting lens. In addition, the comfortable hand grip is constructed in such a way as to permit stable one-hand operation.

Giugiaro created the Necchi 570, an elegant sewing machine currently in use. In the works is a machine which has an L-shaped arm with its needle at the forward end. This brings the working area directly in front of the operator and still leaves ample space for handling the material.

A lively, impulsive man, Giugiaro is always armed with bundles of pens, pencils and colored chalk in every pocket. Rather than talk, he often sketches his part of a conversation. At Aspen, Colo., last June before an audience of 1,600 fellow designers, he chose not to read a paper on automobile design, but to draw his lecture. With the aid of special pens, he made sketches on an illuminated board, which were projected on a large screen.

The son and grandson of craftsmen who decorated churches and palazzi in the village of Garessio in northwest Italy, Giugiaro was hired by Fiat's design department when he was 17. At 21, he was lured away by the famed car designer Nuccio Bertone. In six years with Bertone, he created 20 cars, from economy-model Simcas and Mazdas to expensive Ferraris and Aston Martins. At 27, Giugiaro graduated to Ghia, where he designed renowned sports cars for Maserati and De Tomaso. At 30, he opened his own firm. Married, the father of two children, Giugiaro resides in a rambling ranch-style house outside Turin that he planned with an architect. The interior is decorated with Oriental art and Giugiaro's own paintings. The designer he admires most is Bruno Sacco, who styles the Mercedes. Says Giugiaro: "Sacco's work shows it is possible to renovate an object in which the models may appear to be the same, but are actually improving from generation to generation."

Commissions for Giugiaro now seem to come in faster than the awards Ital Design keeps winning. They include a new electric razor for N.V. Philips of Holland, a television set for Saba of Germany, an electronic scale for Yamato Scale Co. of Japan and the interior for a personal helicopter for the President of Italy.

All of this Giugiaro approaches not so much with Italian flair as with an Italian craftsman's common sense. His most important product is the renewed awareness that good design means making sure that machine-made products serve human needs humanely. One contemporary nuisance that he would like to alter radically is the cramped auto. "Low-slung cars may be chic," he says, "but they are not necessarily convenient for tall people. High cars may seem ugly at first. But tastes change quickly." --By Wolf Von Eckardt. Reported by Walter Galling/Rome

With reporting by Walter Galling/Rome

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