CREASE MONKEY

HOW GIORGETTO GIUGIARO'S FOLDED-PAPER ERA DEFINED THE SEVENTIES AND BEYOND.

GIORGETTO GIUGIARO  is often heralded as the most influential automotive designer of the 20th century, a wunderkind revered for his intrinsic ability to create beautiful, balanced, production-ready forms. His work in the Fifties and Sixties— at Fiat and the Italian carrozzerie Bertone and Ghia—was often so startlingly elegant that the contours seemed predestined. Think of his prototypical sports coupe, the 1963 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT; the 1966 Maserati Ghibli, a minatory exemplar of the front-engine–rear-drive GT; or the 1967 De Tomaso Mangusta, a belligerent mid-engine supercar featuring avant-garde Italian tailoring and cudgeling American V-8 potency.

But when Giugiaro started his own firm, Italdesign, in 1968, the sumptuous swoopiness of his early work seemed to exit his system, and he began to focus on language that was, quite literally, edgier. The hallmarks of this period, known as his folded-paper era, include sharp body creases, hard corners, and boxy envelopes. These new designs combined his greatest qualities: purposefulness, adaptivity, and alluring au courant style.