2024-03-14 10:12:48
The failure of current transformation processes is explained by the lack of morality in the societies being transformed. Above all, it is an aesthetic vacuum. The new eco-social world looks hideously bourgeois and bourgeois at best, and at worst it is just a barren version of the status quo.
When the West had dreams, they were wild and daring. When the tractor manufacturer Ferruccio Lamborghini, annoyed by Ferrari, decided to prove to his fellow entrepreneur in Emilia Romagna that he was also capable of designing highly motorized dream objects, he took this step with a team of twenty-somethings.
Turin-born Marcello Gandini was in his mid-20s when he designed one of the most beautiful automobiles of the 20th century. The Lamborghini Miura, the first sports car that could compete with Ferrari in terms of beauty, but unlike the Renaissance beauties from Pininfarina had a provocative, even lascivious design language.
Automobildesigner Marcello Gandini (1938–2024)
Those: LightRocket via Getty Images/Stefano Guidi
When you open the doors of the Miura, the sports car mimics the silhouette of a bull, the Lamborghini logo. In the first series of the then revolutionary mid-engine twelve-cylinder, Gandini decorated the front lights with elegant black eyelashes.
Marcello Gandini died at the age of 85
One of the many myths surrounding the origins of the Miura is that Gandini was winked at by a gorgeous Milanese woman the night before. Together with race engineer Gian Paolo Dallara and test engineer Bob Wallace, all in their twenties, he created such a spectacular vehicle that was presented as a prototype at the Turin Motor Show in 1965 and as a more developed production model at the Geneva Motor Show.
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It was a revolution before the often uptight bourgeois children sought one in 1968 with such spectacles. Their mostly radically unfulfilled rebellious dream of a wild life, “If you sleep with the same person twice, you already belong to the establishment,” was such a boring catechism for the bull-necked machismos of Miuras, whose daring playboy life was always threatened with heroic self-extinction in the fast lane.
Gandini created dreams of a better, more beautiful world. A world in which dreams, not lies, set the pace of modernization. His design for the Lancia Stratos Zero, designed for Bertone in 1970, ventured into science fiction iconography. Only 84 centimeters high, it challenged every tradition. It was a naked, pure, incredibly beautiful provocation for those who wanted to remain stuck in the status quo. In Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker musical in 1988, Zero makes a dignified cameo appearance.
Lancia Stratos HF Zero, prototype from 1970
Quelle: The Enthusiast Network via Getty Images/Thomas Voehringer
Like all great designers of this era, Gandini was both a sophisticated spirit and a craftsman. “My father was a conductor and wanted me to become a pianist. It wasn’t until he got into a Lamborghini Miura that he understood that I could play other notes: those of the engines. The roots of my education lie in a family tradition that did not allow for many digressions: the natural path was humanistic, literary, classical studies. “But I rebelled and went my own way,” said Gandini when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Italy.
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Like so many, he came from a small corner of northern Italy where Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini, Gianni Agnelli and Sergio Pininfarina turned the world of goods upside down because they knew that no society could survive without poetry – and because they were proud Italians understood themselves in the tradition of Dante, Palladio and Marinetti.
The Alfa Romeo 33 Carabo, presented in 1968, was a Molotov cocktail in the self-sufficient narrowness of car design. Gandini then went on to design countless masterpieces: the Ferrari 308 GT 4, the second series of the Renault 5 (a popular masterpiece), the Lancia Stratos (icon) and, rarely appreciated, the first series of the 5 Series from BMW.
Gandini died near Turin on Wednesday at the age of 85. Petrolheads around the world are mourning. Anyone who puts a current cargo bike next to a Miura knows that culturally we are on a rotten, declining path. We are transforming ourselves into an aesthetic hell. Gandini’s death should remind us of this.
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