Georges Belami

Giorgetto Giugiaro has evolved from one of Italy’s most gifted car designers, albeit one working at the volume production end of the business, into a corporation, complete with a stock market quotation. Italdesign Giugiaro is now a group of companies employing 720 people with profits of Euro 100 million. And it has done a considerable amount to move beyond the limits of car design. There have been cameras, watches, pasta, and even clothes from the company. Although nothing in this area, it has to be said with quite the same epochal impact as, for example, Giugiaro’s invention of the folded paper styling of the original Golf’s sharply cut lines. Giugiaro’s recent flotation marked a turning-point in the history of Italian design, or at any rate in the way that Italian design has been perceived. Even before going to the market Giugiaro and his group have had an idea of the role of the designer that is rather different from that of cultural agent provocateur in the usual Italian sense. Instead they have tried to build a business by taking on the management of the whole process that separates an idea from a finished product, relieving their clients – industrial corporations which are themselves undergoing a rapid process of reconfiguration – of all responsibility for product development.

The romantic idea of the Italian designer’s creative studio producing a few deft sketches, and perhaps a model, is thus transformed into an industrial package, one that includes the increasingly complex new standards of project and production procedures. The turn key project developments offered by Italdesign are unabashedly market-orientated. But Italdesign’s stockmarket listing was intended to do more than put a cash value on the business. It was a deliberate attempt to give industrial design a new corporate respectability, to allow it to talk the same language as its clients; to give it the same kind of clout. Not so much a sell out, as a dramatic bid to stay in the game which is tending to squeeze out the smaller players. Yet the underlying ambiguity remains difficult to clear up: is Italdesign to be judged by what it achieves in terms of design or in terms of turnover?

Giugiaro’s skills as a designer remain unchanged. But he has to reckon, literally, with the price of Italdesign shares listed daily on the stock market. It was Giugiaro who designed the more recent, sculptural Maserati, on the strength of which the company directed by Luca di Montezemolo moved back onto the US market this year. It’s a useful calling card for new business; as is the new Brera sports prototype, a 2+2 coupé marketed under the Alfa Romeo name and presented with considerable success at this year’s International Motor Show in Geneva. It spells out a clear promotional message, in a period in which the giants prefer to work on design in-house; it is still safe for them to entrust Italdesign Giugiaro with “programmes based on subtle issues requiring expertise and capability”, as the group’s annual report put it. Giugiaro even advocates invading territory normally reserved for the client. He sees the designer monitoring the market, spotting the right product to go for, and handling the complete project process up to the realisation of a prototype to be offered to appropriate clients.

The car market however is cudgelling its brains about what to do about plunging sales. Fiat is going through the unhappiest days of its life, preparing to lay off vast numbers of workers and to close down factories. It is a daunting moment for a company like Giugiaro’s. There is no doubt that he has dealt successfully with economic, political and social problems – including those of Alfasud and the birth of a car plant in the deep southern Italian Pomigliano d’Arco – or with the simultaneous design of three different cars, the Fiat Croma, Saab 9000 and Lancia Thema, on a single platform. Today paradoxically, Giugiaro too, and his Italdesign, are being closely watched by the inscrutable financial world. Whilst he may have held out against capricious and incompetent top managers, with concrete answers to real issues, his company is now having a tough time towing the Stock Exchange line. So maybe it will be better to concentrate once again on the gamble of pure creativity for industry, in which Giugiaro has demonstrated an outstanding flair for taking and overcoming heavy risks.

Gino Finizio, a leading Italian design management theorist, has just published a book, “Gestire l’idea”. In it he tries to explain to designers and industrialists that there is room for intermediate managers if they know how to handle certain complexities, to iron out conflicts and contrasts and to uplift the ethical (hence also economic) function of a project. Giugiaro’s role and name also of course come into this book, suggesting the wisdom of a lucid prophet of today’s design scenarios. Probably, then, this excursion of his onto the treacherous ground of the share market indicates a taste for addressing bigger and bigger challenges. Challenges which Giugiaro simply cannot help but accept.