This issue’s cover story is devoted to Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro, the creators of two new concept cars unveiled at the 2004 Geneva show: the Alfa Romeo Visconti and the Toyota Alessandro Volta.
Fulvio Cinti starts by recounting the past and present of Giorgetto Giugiaro when he met for a chat beside the two new models. Cinti expresses his appreciation of Giugiaro’s rejection of “designer-speak” that pretentiously abstruse language that so many celebrity designers delight in using when describing their work.
In fact there is little abstract obscurantism and a lot of substance in the intense creativity Giorgetto Giugiaro still preserves after forty years in a profession for which he still feels an unabated passion. This time his inexhaustible imagination has helped him create a styling model in the Visconti that offers a whole new approach to the limousine that he hypothesises as the next Alfa Romeo flagship.
The Alessandro Volta prototype offers further convincing proof of the maturity Giorgetto’s designer son Fabrizio has now achieved. This high tech Toyota reveals Fabrizio’s propensity for projects that marry engineering and technological evolution to pure design.
Two separate articles by Silvia Baruffaldi and Marzia Gandini respectively, take a closer look both at the genesis of the Visconti, a two-and-a-half box model which looks as powerfully compact as a coiled spring despite its imposing dimensions and at the Alessandro Volta, an appealing sports car concept powered by a hybrid petrol-electric propulsion system.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 145
