Talking Shop with Car Designer Luigi Colani
October 1, 2007
Whether designing furniture, cameras or the first organically shaped headphones, Luigi Colani is a maverick visionary whose innovations are world renown. Trained in sculpture at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and then aerodynamics at the Sorbonne in Paris, Colani’s early car design breakthrough occurred when he created the first plastic body in France in 1953.
Now 79 and still crafting faster and lighter planes, trains and automobiles, Colani recently bought the Pierce-Arrow automotive name and will soon begin designing cars and other goods under it. He visited the United States in July to speak at the Art Center College of Design, which is where The Robb Report Collection caught up with him.
Q. What attracted you to car design?
A. Well, I couldn’t afford to build a plane, so the next thing in aerodynamics is a car. It’s just economics.
Q. What do you consider yourself first—an aircraft engineer, an artist, or a car designer?
A. I am a 3-D philosopher, that is all, with the technical knowledge to build a car that can go 300 miles [per hour]. We are in the 200-to-300-mile range right now with my cars. … I am a big friend of America, and therefore would like to help young American designers find a way out of the misery of this country car-wise. This country is the richest country in the world and it is miserable car-wise.
Q. What car design had the greatest influence on your education?
A. The Citröen DS. The guy, a sculptor named [Flaminio] Bertoni—an artist—who built the most aerodynamic machine. Imagine, when they put this in the Champs Élysées for the first exhibition. They sold 12,000 the first day and had to start building like madmen. And they built it for 25 years in a row—25 years. [Actually, the car was manufactured from 1955 to 1975.] Ask a designer today to build a car for 25 years; there is none in the world. None. After two years they are out of the game.
Q. What is the most impressive car you have seen designed in the last 10 years?
A. None. There are some sensational fast cars; there are some nice looking cars. But if you look at the exhibition here, the old coach cars—the Delahayes and the Talbot-Lagos—they are 10 times more beautiful than the Audi standing here, the R8. I am ashamed of designers today.
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