Hired in 1955 by Dante Giacosa at FIAT, in 1959 he became head of style for the Bertone bodywork section: among other things, he was responsible for the Alfa Romeo 2000 Sprint and the Fiat 850 Spider. From 1965 he was director of the Ghia Style Centre (De Tomaso Mangusta, Maserati Ghibli). In 1967 he founded Ital Styling, and Italdesign in 1968 with Gianni Mantovani, offering design and engineering services to major European brands and creating cornerstones of automotive design such as the Golf, Panda, Passat, Thema and Uno.
JUSTIFICATION
The Compasso d’Oro for an Italian individual notable for a wide range of activities was awarded to Giorgetto Giugiaro for the impact and quality of design that has distinguished the success of his design group over the past few years and for the vast range of product categories produced both in and outside Italy. Giugiaro expresses the future of the profession of industrial designer, based on an interdisciplinary strategy and specific expertise in integrating many new technologies and disciplines with the typically Italian artisanal tradition and intuitive creativity. The remarkably high level of design engineering applied to such diverse products as cars, sewing machines and musical instruments exhibited in this exhibition clearly illustrates the jury’s opinion. In addition to the quality of the designed products, which often contributes to increased exports, the Ital-Design group has been particularly successful in professional design services. This invisible export of Italian ideas and designs may well become an important extension of a future economic renaissance as well as having an international impact perhaps greater than that of the products themselves exported and so highly appreciated abroad. In a country like ours which is based on an economy of transformation and in which design is fundamental, Giugiaro’s contribution expresses the maturity of Italian design in being able to explore the future in close collaboration with industrial and commercial activities and which ends up by being the truest expression of industrial design.
