Welcome everyone to our guests. Thank you all for being here with us.
Thank you again. I'll leave the floor to our president Benedetto Camerana for the introductory greeting. Thank you.
Thank you. Good evening everyone and naturally a greeting to our guests Giorgetto Giugiaro and Flavio Manzoni, who have attracted numerous people, we see with great success. Now it will be your turn to tell your stories, questioned by Paolo Tuminelli, Professor Paolo Tuminelli, who as you can see is written curator of the design space.
This is information we are giving now because recently Professor Tuminelli has taken on this role with the Automobile Museum, this role of accompanying us on a journey that we have already started for a long time, actually for many years, but which we are reviewing again with a more in-depth and possibly also international perspective on a theme, one of the great pillars of this museum's life, which is design.
Which is not just car design, but also design in the broad sense, and maybe Paolo will make some jokes. Paolo Tuminelli is fundamentally a professor, the main role you have is professor in Cologne, at an important technical university and of design culture, but with a very important broad sense. Maybe I said it badly because the German term is different and has an interpretation coming from Italy, from Milan, from our culture, but going to Germany, so a European breath that we want to give very sincerely to this museum.
And besides, he also had a very important role in launching an idea that unfortunately didn't take off, but was very interesting, when Art Basel, the world's largest art fair, wanted to propose an incursion into the world of automotive design, of car collecting, which was, according to all of us, very visionary. In fact, everyone had participated, and so this is another of the many roles that Paolo Tuminelli, Professor Tuminelli, has, and I wanted to briefly highlight this to better define the direction the museum is taking.
So Paolo will question our two great designers. I just wanted to say something that came to mind, because I think it's a micro key to interpretation that I'll launch now, because there's a very interesting parallel in your stories that is different in different times, but it's that when you, Giorgetto, left Bertone and launched Ital Design, you launched an adventure that was founded on the very close integration with Aldo Mantovani of style and design with engineering, with the mechanism of the automobile, the production of the automobile's mechanism.
Which was a key to interpretation that led to great success. But I see a parallel with the work that Flavio Manzoni has been doing for several years, let's say 15 years we have the exhibition, I say it because this way I do a bit of advertising, that above there's the 15-year exhibition of the style center, which represented the Ferrari style center, as we said at the inauguration, a very interesting key to interpretation which is that of putting together all the engineering that is within the Maranello enclosure, the industrial enclosure, so from safety to aerodynamics, all possible mechanical engineering working together with style, with design, which if we want in a more contemporary key is the same idea that you had developed with Mantovani many years ago.
So I wanted to highlight this. Thank you, you have your microphone, I'll leave you this. Alright. So, Paolo, the floor is yours.
Thank you. And meanwhile good evening to this numerous and wonderful audience, not only from Turin, and thank you Benedetto for the introduction, and thank you to you who are two fantastic guests as an inaugural ceremony for my very modest position, but I hope full of great projects at the Mauto, I couldn't have expected a better occasion.
And it pleases me, beyond the things for which the president cited me, I thank both President Benedetto Camerana and Director Lorenza Bravetta for being able to be here today after a very quick invitation that I accepted with the enthusiasm you can imagine.
I like to think that beyond the things I was cited for, one of the projects that also ties me to Turin is a project from a few years ago, because we return to Turin World Design Capital, and I had the fortune and happiness of becoming friends with an extraordinary person who unfortunately isn't here with us tonight, Giuliano Molineri, who invited me to be curator together with him of an exhibition, Dream, the car of the future from 1950 to today.
And so it was a beautiful exhibition at the Agnelli Pavilion, and it's nice after so many years to return to Turin and deal with, among other things, exhibitions. Besides, Giuliano was also for me a fortunate encounter and a moment of personally meeting the myth Giorgetto Giugiaro, because after that exhibition there was, you won't remember Giorgetto, there was a lunch at your place where you also invited, and I know the audience, Rodolfo Gaffino, at the time director of the museum.
And at this lunch, we essentially entered the dimension of working together, of discovering the mysteries also of this splendid museum which has not only, as you know, the exhibition part, but many hidden treasures to reveal and that I hope we can reveal soon indirectly.
Perhaps I'll also tell you how I met Flavio for the first time. Flavio, whom I already knew, because being in Germany and having studied in Germany, among Italians in Germany, the second-wave emigrants, at least by name we knew each other, but as a German I was invited, and perhaps you'll remember, by you at Maranello for the presentation of the Ferrari California.
There was a wonderful dinner at the Osteria Francescana, and he asked this small group of journalists from all over the world, what is the car, in short, that you like the most? And I hoped to provoke him a bit and immediately answered obviously the Panda.
But he didn't feel provoked at all and in fact embraced, as many others did, the thesis that the Panda was a truly brilliant project, and I must say that this intellectual honesty from none other than the head of design at Ferrari to say 'Okay, Panda' struck me, and it's one of the things I greatly respect about Flavio, and I'm very happy to see him again today, and I'll say it right away.
I hope you recognize him with a transformed look compared to the very serious manager I saw at the inauguration of the Ferrari exhibition, which I beg you to go visit afterwards, at least for those who have the credentials, also to understand many things he'll say about the cars he's made, because speaking of these two characters I feel very much in difficulty, obviously.
Fame isn't everything. How do you present Giorgetto Giugiaro? In reality he's unpresentable because a quarter of a century ago you could say car designer of the century. One of the few Italians, there are 8 out of 800 Italians present in the Automotive Hall of Fame of Detroit which welcomes many Americans, engineers, designers and various people who dealt with automobiles, just eight Italians, of these only three designers and they are Battista Pininfarina, Nuccio Bertone and Giorgetto Giugiaro, but also characters like Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of Fiat, and Enzo Ferrari, so also here a nice connection.
But after these 25 years you've done many other things, starting from Ghia, moving forward. So now you'd need to invent a new way to define yourself, perhaps car designer of the millennium, I don't know. In reality he's seriously more than a designer. You're a cultural phenomenon who has known how to give to the automobile, and also in the Treccani encyclopedia not many are already cited in the Treccani encyclopedia, precisely because there are many people who work who don't know? Ah, interesting. Giorgetto Giugiaro, go see.
Presenting Flavio is very easy, instead he's very presentable because when you say Chief Design Officer of Ferrari what more do you want? What more do you want? It's one of the most prestigious brands on the planet, not so much measured in terms of the cost of the car, but of performance, of colors, of flavors of the earth, of the engines that you represent, because Ferrari is certainly from an objective point of view of value, we know from the collector car market, the most recognized automobile in terms of contents that are both stylistic and technical and cultural.
And representing the person who essentially created the style center, excuse me if I call it style center, but I don't think it's an offense, the Ferrari style center, and after a history that starts in Turin with the great Turin coachbuilders, having taken this heritage and transformed it into a patrimony of projects and objects that is also difficult perhaps for those who aren't really, let's say, attached to the brand, we are many, but we also need to understand and know all the things you do.
I counted 66 automobile projects actually realized since you've been at Ferrari, but you told me probably there are even more, and who knows how many things have been done that can't be told, and instead I hope they can be told tonight. Since I've talked about myself too much and told you a bit about them, to break the ice, I'd like Giorgetto and Flavio to tell their story. Starting from Giorgetto, when did Flavio Manzoni appear in your universe of designer of the century?
When we decided to join the Audi Volkswagen group, for which he was already part of the project responsibilities, and so I met him with an exceptional surprise. As a boy he drew portraits, landscapes like I did. We found portraits that were like he was my colleague, he much better, more precise, so he gave me several that I will keep.
So I found in him something that reminded me of when I was young and wanted to be an artist, because my grandfather painted, decorated, my father the same, and then to earn something and live I entered the world of the automobile. But by chance, until 17 I didn't know what an automobile was.
Yes. So, he doesn't remember. We met much earlier, in '95, when we worked on the same car, the Maserati 3200 GT, of which I had taken care of the interiors, you the bodywork, and it seemed incredible to me. I was at Lancia at the time and it happened that we were a bit understaffed, at a certain point the request arrived to work on that project for Maserati, right?
So we saw each other a few times.
Some details that I don't remember.
I didn't remember for a long time, but then we really became friends during the Volkswagen period.
Yes, but he doesn't know that I used to dream about him practically every summer when I was in Sardinia because I hoped to meet him. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a car designer, I kept telling my father, 'Can you please take me to Costa Smeralda to meet Giugiaro? Can't you find some connection?' No, there was no way. So I couldn't realize this dream then, but he was my virtual mentor, because I didn't know him yet.
But he was an incredible source of inspiration. When I was a boy, perhaps I wouldn't do this job if it weren't for designers like Giugiaro who made, especially the dream cars that I loved then, besides the production cars which were spectacular, they were pure visions, and this fascinated me enormously.
And so I remember when I was a kid, I'll say a few words, that I collected all the photos, the drawings of his cars, but especially the drawings. I still remember this beautiful catalog of the Delta where there were his Canson drawings and some perspective drawings done on glossy paper.
I think it's better if you explain what Canson is because you see here there's Canson.
Canson is a particular cardboard that has beautiful colors on which you could draw very well.
And they were wonderful, it's incredible stuff.
So what struck me the most was his ability to unite art with design.
But speaking of Canson, Canson was a type of paper with different colors, so when I made a drawing it already had the background color, you added a bit of light, a bit of reflections, that's why Canson was so sought after.
So it went fast, in short, also because you made really many cars. And here now I want to, I mentioned the Panda before which I think you see appearing, if they haven't censored it, among so many beautiful Ferraris, the sports cars of one and the other, because we also need to remember that and perhaps it's also nice to see in the different professional path, you're a corporate guy, if we want, you went from Fiat to Seat, Lancia, Volkswagen, then Ferrari always in a role representing a company for which you dealt with the creative direction of design, while Giorgetto is a handyman, as you defined yourself before, did almost everything alone, founding his company that did consulting for many, so it's really a different way of approaching the business and automobile design.
And in this position you had the fortune to make perhaps in the end fewer supercars than Flavio, but you made them for everyone, from Aston Martin to Lotus, also some Ferraris, and alongside this you made many utility cars, many popular cars that everyone knows, that you probably have in your family background. Now, Flavio, I'll provoke you with a typical quote from Giorgetto who says: 'In all this, making a sports car is easy because they make few, it can cost a lot, there's a different freedom, while making utility cars that must cost little is the real challenge for design.' This seems to me a possible key to understand what's behind the design of an exceptional automobile like the ones you design and maybe also reflect on the culture of automobile design starting from the Canson cardboard.
But this is a lie, excuse me. I've worked on projects of various nature, also the City Car 500, at the time when I was head of design at Fiat and others at Volkswagen, so I know what it means. It's certainly not simple and there are obvious budget limitations. However, the project of a Ferrari today or anyway of a high-performance vehicle like today's is extremely complex.
And here I invite you only to go see the victory hall of the Maranello museum where all the Formula 1 cars are displayed and there you realize why. Why do I say this? Because from the torpedo shapes to those, let's say, of the 70s, we gradually passed to increasingly complex forms, right? And increasingly, that is, that integrate more and more elements. This is an image that reflects well the level of complexity of today's racing cars. So the so-called style-technical convergence or style-aerodynamics convergence is very complex, very.
They are different difficulties, understood? Of a different nature.
I don't know exactly, I don't have anymore... Yes, give me this. Thank you. I seem to remember that your first supercar, which was then a concept car, is the Testudo, made perhaps with a technique, a mechanics not too high-performance, but with a very high-performance line and perhaps even from '59.
So you now have three-quarters of a century of experience almost. Tell us.
Testudo is the first vehicle not immediately sellable because the coachbuilders made projects for industrial actors, so their creativity was sold. The Testudo is part of the drawings that I presented to Bertone to do some illustrations, being a Fiat employee, to earn something different.
Bertone sees this vehicle, says 'No, no, bring me to see more current vehicles.' I was a bit surprised. He gives me a chassis that was from the 2006 Alfa Romeo. I make this diligent drawing to be able to get an order to illustrate his vehicles.
A week passes, then he calls me, tells me 'Your design is fine, Alfa Romeo liked it.' I almost faint and say how Alfa Romeo, I'm a Fiat employee. But Alfa Romeo has decided to make it, so you have to come to me in the evening to make it. But how? I'm at Fiat, I'll come. No, no, no. So he tells me, 'How much do you earn at Fiat?' At Fiat I remember I earned 80,000 lire, something like that. I'll give you, talk to my brother-in-law, I'll give you 120. Ah, 50% more. I'll come right away, then I stop and tell him 'But it was December, late November December, in March I have to do military service, so it's useless for me to quit and then have to do military service.'
So you don't have Scaglione as a replacement. Scaglione was a genius but he went to the restaurant, went to work when he wanted. Basically he tells me 'Come to us, you won't do military service.' I quit immediately.
In March the draft notice arrives. No accountant, the draft notice arrived. Go do military service. Yes, yes. I couldn't avoid it, but I'll send you to the Alpines. I've already booked a room in a hotel, you eat at the hotel, you leave at 5 in the afternoon and go draw. He basically set me up like that.
The story is beautiful. I'd like you to remind us because then... and maybe I'll ask Flavio... No, but you were talking about the Testudo. Exactly. I'd like you to remind us also in terms of the study of this line, of this car that you then built and was also driven, if I remember correctly, from Turin to Geneva for the motor show. How long did it take you? What did you think about? How did a project like this develop?
Yes, so Chuck Jordan arrives who was the head of General Motors Style together with Bill Mitchell and they sent him to Opel, and going to Opel he wanted to visit the coachbuilders. He arrives at Bertone, they show him my studio and he says 'But we would like to make a vehicle on your chassis. Make it immediately. Yes, yes, make it for Geneva.'
Bertone had no relationship with Opel, so by making this prototype at his own expense, he hoped to have a return with a connection with Opel. That's why the Testudo was born. The Testudo is a sedan with a rear engine, air-cooled, opposed, and I wanted to make a coupe on this base which was drawn on January 2, '63, on the road to Geneva in March '63.
So making the drawing, the model, the car to go on the road. He tells me 'Accountant, if there's an accident we won't arrive anymore. Isn't it better to take a truck? Oh, for a beautiful day.'
So, I had an Alfa Romeo prototype for Ruska, who is this great designer, on the Testudo for a winter day, but beautiful. We arrive at Bardonecchia, we get on the train, we arrive behind, it was snowing. You can imagine how an American car holds up on such terrain.
Anyway we arrived at Geneva on the road and we had an escort which was Cingolani, the foreman, so a foreman with things to fix. Bertone and I went to Geneva. Arriving in Geneva, the motor show was still in the city. In front of the coachbuilders' door there was a gas station and I started washing the Testudo together with C. This was the Testudo adventure.
Flavio, let's project ourselves. Since there's applause, I really invite you to see the Corver, which is also a very nice car, and the Testudo, and understand that it's the same car and it's a complete transformation, an incredible alchemy of forms and also of image and sense of the automobile, because the Testudo looks like it's made to go 600 km/h. The strange thing is that when it was exhibited in New York the following year, it became the queen of the show, but for a reason. The Americans were much more ahead of us but they made static mannequins. Instead the Testudo was driving around New York. Everyone was amazed because they couldn't imagine that type of vehicle could drive. That's how it went.
So, Flavio, I was asking, let's make a jump of a few decades. You make at Ferrari and I believe it's known, very tailor-made, I believe is the right word, unique automobiles, like the Testudo could be, for unique clients who probably have a very direct, even personal relationship with you, I imagine. And they are cars that are made like a suit is made. Maybe try to tell us about one of these projects that perhaps has fewer general marketing constraints compared to the need to make particular numbers, particular homologations, and let's try to understand how much has changed and how much has happened in the world of design. So, if I arrive and ask you to make me a car, what happens then? How much work is there? What do you think about? How do you convince me?
Yes, it's a very interesting research area, right? Because even if they are vehicles more than tailor-made they are one-offs, so made in a single copy for a single client. Beyond, let's say, listening to their desires and transforming them into project inputs, there's also the pleasure of doing research, right? And it's a research that can also, let's say, go in different directions than those of the range, right? And they are projects that have characteristics similar to what Giorgetto described of the Testudo, they are not based on existing mechanics because then there's a homologation problem, that is, you can change, let's say, the bodywork, some interior components, but the substance must remain, otherwise from a point of view also of cost, of price for the client it becomes an unsustainable thing.
We've made several. Here there are some, among other things, on display. There's the SP38 made for a great Swiss art collector who at a certain point decided to invest in an automobile as a work of art. Deborah. Deborah, yes. Deborah, who is a great collector of various Impressionists, I believe she has the largest collection of Odilon Redon, this great painter, she wanted to do this operation.
And then there's the P80/C also displayed here, which instead is a different type of vehicle because it was conceived for track use, so with, let's say, even fewer constraints, because the problem often is the constraints dictated by homologation. If you design a car for the track, for us designers it's a bit more fun because you can do without certain elements. I'll give an example, even the headlights almost disappear, small light groups are enough, and at the back too. So there are fewer problems regarding the guards, let's say, anyway there are more degrees of freedom that make the object even more dramatic from the point of view of form, and we've made several of these.
Well, I imagine however that a car with the performance of a Ferrari today, for example in terms of aerodynamics, must be studied carefully, so perhaps even for a car like this you lose days, weeks or months in the tunnel to understand how it works.
They are projects that last at least 3 years, like a production car. They are production cars that last even more. But there's a maniacal attention to technical aspects like aerodynamics, because you can't do without it, because then they are cars that have extraordinary performance and so they must work well. So it's a work in synergy with the other areas of Ferrari that takes place more or less with the same method as production projects, and the beauty of Ferrari is precisely this, the ability to work in close synergy with a very high level of collaboration, so it's truly an integrated project where form is not just, is no longer perhaps as it could have been in the past in the era of the coachbuilders, almost a shell drawn around a chassis, right? And so interpreted also with the style of the various coachbuilders with different stylistic codes. It's a much more integrated project, form and function truly remain almost fused together.
Thank you. We'll return, actually we'll deal a lot with form and especially with style. And precisely for this I wanted to ask Giorgetto, perhaps the important moment in your stylistic career was when you adopted new forms that now they call, especially in England, they call origami, they define you the father of origami and I find this very nice, but let's say we go to the times of the Golf obviously, but also the Lotus Esprit, the Maserati Boomerang which was a very significant concept car and then also a big car that we have at the museum now and which perhaps is the automobile strangely for which you are most famous in the world, which is the DeLorean that everyone knows, even children. So what was happening there, how did this form arrive and what was in that form the aerodynamic or technical thinking?
So, coming from Bertone and having had success on sports vehicles, but of small series, except the 850 Spider Fiat, the problem was that going to Ghia, I didn't want to go to Ghia, I went to Ghia because they offered me the management position. I told Bertone, but I don't want to leave, I just want the management position that they offered me. We will never make you a manager. I'll give you a million lire more, but I won't give you the management position.
I, being married with a child, cared about being a manager, so we parted on this note. I was destroyed inside because I didn't want to leave. Anyway I left and I thought about changing a bit what were the aspects of success that I had from Bertone, the Grifo, the Kangaroo, etcetera etcetera.
And what did I devise? Flat planes, completely different lines, unusual, all flatter. It's so true that when I went to test the Bizzarrini, the head of Ferrari told me 'Ah, you're the one who makes flat vehicles, the Mangusta which is all flat.' So I changed deliberately to make it clear that it wasn't Bertone that made me do this type of vehicles. I wanted to demonstrate my total decision to change.
So that's why I made all these flat vehicles, then a bit rounded, then looking at Porsche which always made everything round because we were all influenced by the round which was a kind of madness. And now we've had the experience first of much class, then we had the experience of round readings but with edges, then flat, then round again. Today we've had the experience of using edges, curves, planes, so it's a natural process of someone who works on an object that in some way must be between useful and functional.
Well, excuse me, I return to the question. This flat line wasn't necessarily wanted or dictated by criteria for example aerodynamic, that is, it didn't have a supplementary function compared to... Chapman, enthusiastic about the drawing, then asks me for the model, something I never do, while I was making the model, Chapman finds the wind tunnel of the model, calls me and tells me I'm not interested anymore, and why? Because it doesn't have the aerodynamics that I wanted. Well, we'll manage, we did it at our own expense, we presented it at the motor show, it had so much success that he decided to make it.
And long live honesty. Thank you Giorgetto, but I didn't want it.
Well, this happened often.
