The Most Influential Car Designer of the 20th Century Made More Than Supercars

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.

This story originally appeared in Volume 18 of Road & Track.

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.

Design historians have attributed his shift to varied contextual influences: The 1968 global student uprisings that celebrated overthrowing convention. The diminished expense of joining straight-lined panels, which was relevant for an industry consolidating and reeling amid the oil crises of the Seventies. The rise of brutalist architecture, which revered planarity and imposition, rendered in industrial materials. And our moves into space, where angularity conjured a future of fresh possibility or scarcity.

Giugiaro had a simpler explanation. In 2019, he told Esquire, “After leaving Bertone and Ghia, I needed a distinctive style of my own, so people didn’t think I was using my employers’.”

The real foundation of these efforts was the 1974 Volkswagen Golf. Seeking a replacement for the superannuated Beetle, Volkswagen brass toured the Turin Auto Show and discovered that most of their favorite designs were Giugiaro’s. His angular, water-cooled, front-­engine–front-drive concept opposed the Bug pervasively. But its flaring arches, upright C-pillar, slim horizontal grille and beltline, and large greenhouse set the genetic code for generations of two-volume econoboxes. His concurrent Scirocco, looking like a Golf compressed in a taut lunge, did the same for economical sports coupes.

Also in 1974, Giugiaro created the boldly faceted Pony Coupe concept, which helped introduce Hyundai to the wider world. The Pony has so beguiled the company’s current designers that they’ve created a modern version of it, the N Vision 74 concept. The striking Ioniq 5 EV hatchback is another unabashed tribute to this era of Giugiaro’s work.