MARCELLO
GANDINI

The Art of Rebellion

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By Marzia Gandini
Founder, Studio Marcello Gandini
Daughter of Marcello Gandini

Purity, courage, perseverance, a genius that revealed itself with the lightness that marks innate talent, and a form of gentle rebellion against the easy way.

One that never faded throughout his entire life.

Marcello Gandini

The First Act of Rebellion

Born in Turin in 1938, into a family in which mechanics held little sway, my father was meant to follow another path.

My grandfather Marco was an orchestra conductor: a degree in law first, one in pharmacy afterwards, and in the meantime a diploma from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin.

A classical, solid education, a life of culture and anti-fascist civic commitment. He belonged to the Turin circle of intellectuals around Piero Gobetti, Felice Casorati and Francesco Menzio, which certainly meant a great open-mindedness, but not so great as to accept the idea of studies other than the classical lyceum, followed by a university course leading to a recognised profession.

My father attended the classical lyceum and studied piano, all with a distracted, disenchanted detachment.

Those seemingly fixed rails, that immersion in the humanities and classical culture, did nothing but spark in him a stubborn, absolute, urgent passion for mechanics and engineering.

At sixteen, with the money set aside for some books of Latin translations, he bought Dante Giacosa's Motori Endotermici (Internal Combustion Engines), a book that still sits on the desk in his studio today, and studied it line by line until he knew it by heart.

It was the first act of constructive rebellion of his life.

And I can already tell you it would not be the last.

Motori Endotermici by Dante Giacosa

Without a Penny,
Rather Than Betray an Idea

Once he finished school, he chose not to enrol at university, a decision that meant he could no longer stay within the family fold.

He went to live with a friend, both penniless, in an empty house on Corso Massimo D'Azeglio in Turin, made available by another friend, with only the certainty that he wanted to design cars.

At a time, between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, when the word “designer” did not even exist.

There were no degree courses for what he wanted to do: one could study to become an engineer or an architect, but there was no school for someone who, like him, imagined lines and innovations for the car that were unthinkable at the time.

He did small coachbuilding jobs for hill-climb racing cars, drew advertising sketches, cartoons, furniture: anything to survive while staying true to a single fixed idea.

Claudia

In those years of vibrant, penniless apprenticeship he met my mother, Claudia.

He was twenty-three, she sixteen, and from then on she was, for his whole life, the person who made it possible for him to become a great designer and innovator.

He was the creative mind, always years ahead of his time; she had the ability to maintain relationships, build stability, organise workflows, and hold every aspect of life and career in a magical balance.

Marcello Gandini had a brilliant mind, pure and free of any preset scheme, and I can say with certainty that the credit for putting it in a position to flourish and to follow the boldest, most extraordinary paths and visions belongs entirely to Claudia Provera, to her perseverance, her courage, her ability to see beyond.

Claudia and Marcello Gandini

BERTONE

At twenty-seven he was called back by Nuccio Bertone, who had already wanted him two years earlier, to take on the role of head of design at the Turin coachbuilder that bore his name.

A small portfolio of drawings of cars so futuristic they seemed impossible to build, yet unmistakable in their line, convinced the great Turin entrepreneur.

In October 1965 Marcello Gandini took up the role of chief stylist at Bertone, with a creative freedom that he himself, looking back, considered almost unbelievable for an unknown young man of that age.

It was there, between the late 1960s and the 1970s, that the lines were born which would change the way cars were designed forever.

He drew the Lamborghini Miura, sinuous and sensual, and immediately did something that would become his creative signature and his approach to life:

to completely overturn what he had just conceived.

To shock the public with something entirely different, angular, hard to love at first sight: The Countach.

The essence of Marcello Gandini as a designer was never to copy.

Not even himself.

In those years he scandalised with the Zero; seduced with the Carabo, the Urraco, the Lancia Stratos; enchanted with the Marzal, the Sibilo, the Rainbow and the Runabout.

Works of his youth that became the reason why generations of young people went on to become car designers.

Lamborghini LP500 Prototype, Geneva Motor Show, 1971

What is a Car?

Yet he never much liked talking about his projects, about what he had already done, about one creation or another.

He was far more interested in thinking and rethinking what a car truly was, deep down, as he explained during the Lectio Magistralis he delivered at the Politecnico di Torino for the conferment of his honorary degree in Mechanical Engineering, on 12 January 2024:

“It is not simply a means of transport. It is a dream, a desire, one that has lasted for millennia.

It is half a flying carpet and half a home.”

It is the magic object that gives us the freedom to go wherever we want in an instant, while at the same time offering protection, shelter, a space that moves along with us.

It is freedom. Individual freedom.

For me, this is the very essence of the car, to which so many other emotional elements are added.

A car is the pleasure of owning a smooth, seductive, important object.

It is also an expression of the romantic side of mechanics: that is, the psychological extension of our physical possibilities, the continuation of ourselves, of our desire for speed, for strength, for perfection.

For beauty.

And more than that, the car is the object that most exalts the one true invention of mankind, the only element not found in nature that man has added: The wheel.

In nature there was the aeroplane — birds; the ship — a floating tree trunk; electronics — the nervous system.

Not the wheel.

There were round boulders, a disc cut from a tree trunk, that could roll, but man added the axle, and from there he set the world in motion.

The Piccola

Beyond the Icons

In the last twenty years of his life, he devoted himself to research less known to the wider public, but one he perhaps cared about more than anything else:

how to radically simplify the construction of a car.

Reducing the number of components and using composite materials that were, at the same time, structure and finish.

A project capable of overcoming an enormous limitation that the car has carried with it forever: being built the wrong way round, like a ship in a bottle, in which the exterior is built first and then an infinite number of parts and components are fitted inside, through just as many operations.

His research developed first with the Piccola, in the 1980s, an independent project later sold exclusively, together with all its patents, to Renault, and later, in the 2000s, with a far more advanced evolution.

The entire mechanical package built on two subframes, front and rear; the body made from composite skins, negative and positive, foamed on the inside to create the structure; finishes and every detail achieved directly during the moulding process; the whole thing assembled with just a few simple operations, to build the finished car in very few steps.

The goal was to create the same functions with as few elements as possible and with recyclable materials, shrinking factory footprints and speeding up processes.

Concepts that, presented to Ratan Tata in 2007, were immediately understood and appreciated by him, which led to a contract for the research and development of the project.

Five years later, in 2012, the first car built entirely of composite material, modular and adaptable into dozens of different versions, came into being.

As always, it was extreme innovation, ahead of its time, bringing to light something that had not existed before.

The Only Way to Honour the Past

It is hardly surprising, then, that he had little enthusiasm for the current era of the car, made up of a continuous repetition of the same shapes, the same concepts, the same lines.

Excessive homogenization. That is, the strategy of many car manufacturers, particularly in the luxury segment, of endlessly replicating their own past instead of reinventing it, was, to him, something that went against all logic.

“The only way to honour the past is not to copy it, to have the courage never to repeat it, even when it is the more convenient, more profitable path.”

Daring, innovating, and stripping cold marketing strategies out of the creative process to create dream cars ought to be compulsory in the business plan of every CEO, he said in the message to the public I read on the occasion of the GIMS Qatar 2023 Future Design Forum, held in partnership with the Qatar Auto Museum and Car Design News at the National Museum of Qatar.

His message to young designers, engineers and creatives of every kind was to be prepared, to know thoroughly everything that had already been designed and thought — let's say from Leonardo da Vinci onwards — in the field of mechanics and innovation, so as to be truly able to create things nobody had ever thought of before.

Never to stop drawing by hand, writing, doing calculations on a sheet of paper.

Because:

“If you don’t have an idea when you sit at your desk, no technological wonder can create it for you.”

Marcello Gandini during the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the Lamborghini Miura in 2016

The Man I Knew at Home

It has been two and a half years since my father passed away, and even today I still happen to find, in some drawer or at the bottom of a folder, one of his sketches on tracing paper, one of those freehand lines that he knew how to make perfect on the first try.

Rereading his words, the interviews, the notes he left behind over the years, I always find the same man I knew at home:

ironic, impatient with rules imposed from above, capable of turning every limitation into a drive to do better.

A man who, despite having put his name to hundreds of projects and having drawn a great many of the most celebrated cars in history, never stopped thinking of himself, deep down, as that eighteen-year-old boy who had chosen to live without a penny rather than betray an idea.

His one true inspiration was always the future, right up to the last day of his life.

What Remains

The best way to remember him is not to list the wonderful cars, but also helicopters, houses, products of every kind, that he put his name to, but to hold on to his teaching, at once the simplest and the hardest:

Never repeat even yourself.

Keep your own talent pure.

Never pollute it with the temptation of the easy way.

Never dilute it with strategies aimed solely at profit.

What remains of a life lived like this is not fame, wealth or power: it is an extraordinary human and professional legacy, made up of dreams of the future and unbridled courage.

A message that lives on in his studio in Almese, which for forty years was the heart of his genius: a space charged with a unique aura, immersed in the silence of nature, at once the generator and the container of innovation, passion and purity.

With young designers, creatives of every kind, and companies interested in innovative thinking, we will meet again among his drawing boards, to breathe in the air and the aura of this simple yet densely creative space, one that invites us to interpret the world around us using only the tools of truth, courage, imagination and lightness.

Accompanying us, as if he had merely stepped out for a moment, is Marcello, with his capacity to astonish, flitting lightly from one invention to the next, leaving everyone in awe.

My commitment, from now on, will be to carry Marcello Gandini's message to every creative mind able and willing to receive it.

I want to develop, at various levels, activities that do not simply celebrate his figure but that truly spread his story, his professionalism and his design approach: workshops, projects with institutions, museums, universities as well as immersive experiences.

Alongside this comes the development of some of his unpublished projects, one of which is already under way, and which I will tell you about in the not-too-distant future.