Design: Colani?s Concepts Make Concept Cars Look Tame March 2, 2007
Luigi Colani, the ?designer?s designer? whose free-flowing concept cars are often too esoteric for production, has had a considerable influence in the design world.
I AM at the moment building the most sensational Corvette ever,” Luigi Colani said. Not that Chevrolet had asked him to design a Corvette, any more than BMW, Ferrari, Mazda, Volvo or other automakers had asked him to design the many models he has created over the last half-century. His artistry does not require an invitation.
“The car they have is pretty good, maybe a 50, but mine will be a 99!” Mr. Colani said in a telephone interview from his studio in Karlsruhe, Germany. “I want to show it to Bob Lutz, my good friend.” He was referring to the vice chairman of General Motors.
Mr. Colani, a sort of designer’s designer better known for his far-out, free-flowing concepts than for his modesty, is showing up everywhere. Turn on the television and there (on Valentine’s Day) he is on the Discovery channel’s “FutureCar” series, gesturing with a cigar, his designs juxtaposed with praise from the chief designer of the real Corvette, Tom Peters.
“I am not a designer,” Mr. Colani said on the program. “I am a three-dimensional philosopher of the future.”
Yet he has produced consumer products of surprising practicality and longevity. His Canon T90 won awards and established the look of many future ergonomic cameras. His headphones for Sony in the 1980s were an early example of the ear buds so common today. His Drop tea kettle for Rosenthal, the German china maker, is considered a classic. He has designed glasses, binoculars, even a computer mouse. All share at least a bit of the dreamy quality of his cars.
“Soft shapes follow us through life,” he said in the television program. “Nature does not make angles. Hips and bellies and breasts - all the best designers have to do with erotic shapes and fluidity of form.”
Younger designers who avoid modern edges in favor of the softer shapes, like Karim Rashid, cite him as a hero. Mr. Rashid was 12 when he discovered Mr. Colani in 1972; they finally met a couple of years ago.
“He is one of the main reasons I decided to dedicate my life to design,” said Mr. Rashid, known for his bloblike furniture and housewares. “His form and conceptual experimentation borders on the metaphysical.”
Ross Lovegrove, the London-based designer of innovative furniture and products, also encountered Mr. Colani’s work when he was a teenager in 1973. In the book “Colani: The Art of Shaping The Future” by Albrecht Bangert (Bangert Verlag, 2004). Mr. Lovegrove calls Mr. Colani “perhaps the most influential form visionary of the 20th century in industrial design,” adding, “He has created dreams that push our limits of perception of space and technological possibility.”
Now Mr. Colani is being recognized by a wider audience. The Design Museum in London opened a show of his work yesterday called “Translating Nature” (designmuseum.org/exhibitions). It runs through June 17 and is accompanied by Mr. Bangert’s book. Mr. Bangert, the show’s curator, writes that Mr. Colani is “the great maverick of 20th-century design.”
The show includes his concept Utah, a yellow Bonneville streamliner designed for a land speed record attempt; his Mercedes 112, a phallic purple dragster; his Ferrari Testa d’Oro concept; images of his visions of a sexier space shuttle for NASA; and a 1,000-passenger airliner.
Mr. Colani’s concepts make most concept cars look tentative. In the design community, his visions of airplanes, trains, furniture and other items of civilization have made him a sometimes secret pleasure. Designers pass his images around, shaking their heads at his temerity and eccentricity. Is he crazy? Did LSD inspire the stuff?
Mr. Colani has long occupied a place in the design world like Syd Mead, who shaped the distinctive look of the landmark science fiction film “Blade Runner.”
In 2002, when the Pinakothek museum in Munich opened its modern collection, a Colani model for an imagined Mach 5 supersonic airliner, inspired by the prehistoric megalodon shark, was hung from the ceiling and his dramatic concept for a biomorphic motorcycle was given a place of pride. A show of his work has been touring German shopping centers for several years.
Mr. Colani’s work, once called “super streamlining” and “bio-baroque,” is now fashionably “organic.” What he drew by hand 50 years ago is now being done by students on computers. These days, he is invited to Davos to talk about design to the most powerful chief executives in the world. He has been recruited by the Chinese to work on the 2008 Olympics and to teach at Tongji University in Shanghai.
- Posted in : Uncategorized
- Author : arnold
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?