The definitive monograph on the work of one of the world's most celebrated car designers. This is the first monograph published on one of the most renowned automotive designers of our time, Giorgetto Giugiaro, who was named Car Designer of the Century in December 1999 and inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2002. The book explores Giugiaro's creative background--he comes from a family of painters and musicians--and the technical and engineering skills he cultivated with his partner Aldo Mantovani, cofounder of his company, Italdesign. He is noted for such iconic concept cars as the Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta, De Tomaso Mangusta, Maserati Ghibli, Iso Grifo, Lamborghini Calà, and Ferrari GG50.

A thorough look at the pioneering work of a world-renowned designer of supercars. Today, Marcello Gandini's global status as one of the most exceptional automobile designers in history is undisputed. He has wielded significant influence on automobile design throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, and his impact endures well into the twenty-first. From iconic vehicles such as the Lamborghini Miura to the Maserati Quattroporte IV, the unassuming Audi 50/VW Polo to the remarkable Cizeta V16T, Gandini has crafted some of the most pivotal machines in automotive history. With hundreds of never-before-seen images and drawings, this book encapsulates Gandini's most significant cars alongside some of his lesser-known gems and presents them to readers in an engaging, accessible format.

When we reflect upon the history of Italian coachbuilding and design, it is impossible to ignore the De Tomaso / Giugiaro Mangusta. It was stunning from every angle; in both art and engineering, it challenged and defined every aspect of motor car design in the mid-1960s while solving the problems associated with midengined design with beauty, grace, and authority. By the dictates of its creator, the Mangusta would be a race car for the street, its chassis based on a contemporary competition car. By the hand of one of the greatest automotive designers in Italy, it would be wide, low, sleek, and of perfect line. Ex-GM Designer Dick Ruzzin knows this well, as did others whose lives were devoted to automotive architecture. The Detroit doyens of design, William L. Mitchell at GM and Gene Bordinat at Ford, realized immediately that the Mangusta was one of the most advanced and beautiful cars in the world. Both ordered a specially tailored Mangusta for their personal use, and Mitchell had his equipped with a Chevy V8. Ruzzin has owned the ex-Mitchell Mangusta for the last forty-seven years. He spent years in Turin and interviewed many of those who still remembered how the Mangusta came to be created. Writing with passion, experience, and knowledge, Ruzzin has expertly authored the only book specifically about the design of the Mangusta. —Pete Vack, Editor and Publisher, VeloceToday.com, LLC ----- Reading about Dick Ruzzin's Mangusta reminds me of two of the most unforgettable characters I ever met. They are, of course, Alejandro de Tomaso and William L. Mitchell. Once known as Europe's most profligate creator of exotic sports and racing prototypes, Argentinean emigre de Tomaso had a phase of fondness for backbone-framed cars that gave birth to the Mangusta, magnificently styled by the young Giorgetto Giugiaro. The mercurial Alejandro finally made good as a car manufacturer—with a little help from the Italian government. A car enthusiast from his bald dome to his Bond Street shoes, Bill Mitchell arranged for GM Styling to buy the latest sports cars to help him persuade GM's often hidebound management that more exciting cars might be good for business. His Chevy-engined Mangusta was a perfect example. Ironically its successor in de Tomaso oeuvre was the Pantera, launched by Ford like an arrow at the heart of GM. Now Dick Ruzzin brings his own enthusiasm for great automobiles to this presentation of an esoteric example from the golden age of Italian sports cars, deeply informed on all aspects of the Mangusta as only a passionate owner can be. —Karl Ludvigsen

A colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house “a machine for living,” was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his “white phase” of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for “a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality,” the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier's energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced. This book is the first to tell the full and true story of Le Corbusier's adventure in automobile design. Architect Antonio Amado describes the project in detail, linking it to Le Corbusier's architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He provides abundant images, including many pages of Le Corbusier's sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier's letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier's design is often said to have been the inspiration for Volkswagen's enduringly popular Beetle; the architect himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. Amado Lorenzo, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way. Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier's career, Le Corbusier did not. This book, lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, restores Le Corbusier's automobile to the main text.

This volume traces through more than 150 years of Italian automotive history. A history made, above all, by men who have put creativity, hard work, inspiration, ingenuity, and tenacity to use in developing their ideas and in giving form to this revolutionary instrument of human mobility.

See what really goes into every aspect of car design.