DESIGN JOURNEYS: BRUNO SACCO Guiding Star

HOW DO YOU REDESIGN THE IDENTITY OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST AUTOMOBILE BRANDS? JUST ASK BRUNO SACCO

- SIMRAN RASTOGI

Boxy, straight-laced, tank-like. The Mercedes-Benz playbook from the early ‘70s through to the late ‘90s was the very embodiment of the engineering that went into the cars. And who wouldn’t want their car to look and feel like a tank, fuelling their inner child’s desires, while appearing very much the successful, corporate type. But Mercedes-Benz didn’t just build executive cars for executives. It’s superbly successful roadster line found takers in everyone from Steve Jobs, to Bruce Lee, to Princess Diana. Even Janis Joplin sang “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?”, but actually owned a Porsche with a psychedelic paint job. Talk about aspirational.

And that’s largely thanks to an Italian designer named Bruno Sacco, who uncharacteristically for an Italian designer of the time, was best known for his restraint in design, despite having the freedom to do otherwise. “The simpler, the better”, Sacco is known to have said, with three generations of the S-Class, two generations of the E-Class and C-Class each, the SL, CLK and SLK roadsters to his credit, apart from the first ever entry-level car to wear the three-pointed star, the A-Class, as well as the first generation of the M-Class badged the ML. They’re all seminal Mercedes designs, and they all came from Sacco, with 1979’s W126 S-Class being his first design — and the car that influenced Mercedes’ subsequent models. As head of design for DaimlerBenz from 1975 till retirement in 1999, Sacco’s personal design philosophy became Mercedes’ first-ever real design philosophy, giving us the family look that other manufacturers have long since come to adopt. In Sacco’s words, “A Mercedes-Benz will always look like a Mercedes-Benz.”

The early years