In car design, the bond between utility and beauty has been broken. If, that is, the bond ever actually existed in the first place. Form does not follow function, it follows fiction. The most beautiful cars are dreams as much as engineering. A generation ago Angelo Tito Anselmi organised an exhibition in Turin’s Palazzina della Promozione delle Belle Arti, a fine art museum. It was called Carrozzeria Italiana – cultura e progetto: ‘Italian coachbuilding – its culture and projects’. The president of the organising committee was Dante Giacosa, designer of the Fiat 500 and Fiat 128. A board member was Mario Revelli de Beaumont, a Piedmont aristocrat, pioneer of the multispace vehicle and champion of electricity as a forza motrice. This was 1978 and talent of such quality does not cluster any more. Anywhere.
The names involved make a sonorous list to those with an ear for bella figura: Boneschi, Bertone, Boano, Castagna, Coggiola, Farina, Fissore, Frua, Gandini, Ghia, Giugiaro, Martin, Michelotti, Pininfarina, Sapino, Scaglietti, Scaglione, Spada, Vignale, Viotti, Zagato. That no distinction was made between coachbuilding firms, metal-bashing artisans, design consultants and independent designers simply shows how, in those days, there was impressive integrity between art and industry.
Almost nothing is left. Bertone was out of business in 2014. Two years later the brothers Mauro and Jean-Franck Ricci bought the rights to the name. No longer were Bertone’s closest collaborators the suppliers of spiffy componentry: Borrani, Magneti Marelli and Campagnolo were replaced by banks and financiers.
Meanwhile, Pininfarina was acquired by India’s Mahindra Group in 2015. It recently showed a parodic hypercar EV called Battista with 1877hp, which, I would think, is of no use to anyone. If it is a dream, it is a bad one. All the others, Ghia and Vignale, for example, have either been meaninglessly absorbed into big corporations or succumbed to dire economic realities. Of the names in paragraph three, only Gandini remains intact and true to original principles. And he was 85 last August.
Car design today has no leaders, a malaise reflected in world architecture. Happily, Norman Foster (88) and Frank Gehry (94) are still at work, but no-one could point to successors of similar stature.
