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Luigi Colani. Success by amazement
… After studying painting and sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, Colani went to Paris, where he studied aerodynamics and drew futuristic studies for car and motorcycle magazines. In 1954 he returned to Germany, where he worked for the car-body builders Rometsch and Erdmann & Rossi. During this period, too, he designed the Colani GT Spider; the only one of his car-body designs to have been produced in any significant quantity to date. Some 500 of these were produced, designed to be mounted as a kit-car on a VW chassis.
… Colani is convinced that almost all design questions have already been answered by Nature. His favourite car, aircraft and ship designs have all been inspired by observations of the natural world, by the morphology of birds and fish. Colani regards himself as superior to computers, and doesn’t use them for the design even of highly complex, dynamic objects. “If I design a high-speed form, I try to understand what nature would have done. If I am building a hydrodynamic shape, I look at the shark and its shape: 140 million years without change – is that success?”
Prototype of sports car in the early ‘70s. Photo Domus 798/97
Prototype for body mounted on a Citroën 2CV, 1980. Photo Domus 798/97
