65 years after its design, the Diamond Linethe car designed in the 1950s by the Milanese architect Giò Ponti and by my colleague Alberto Rosselli. Produced on a 1:1 scale, by a team of experts led by Roberto Giolito, current head of the Heritage area of the FCA group (and father of the current Fiat 500), in collaboration with Pirelli and Editoriale Domus, the prototype will be one of the main attractions of the international exhibition Grand Baselopen from 6 September to 9 September in the Swiss city itself.
A tribute to the greatest innovator in the world of architecture and design in Italy, author of the skyscraper Pirelli of Milan. Although it was not his main field, the famous master Giò Ponti also had the ambition to change the style of 1950s cars, which he considered to be bloated and oversized with small windows and dark interiors. The Milanese architect, who died in 1979 at the age of 87, and his colleague Alberto Rosselli thus designed a small car that had the basic principles of architecture and industrial design of the time, which had not yet been applied in the automotive sector. The result was a car with an aerodynamic tear-shaped silhouette, later transformed into the more angular Diamond Linewith flat body panels and windows, large windows to fill the passenger compartment with light, rubber bumpers around the perimeter, folding doors.
A car that was ahead of its time and whose principles, in fact, were adopted in the 1960s and 1970s first by the Renault 16 and then by the Volkswagen Passat.
Roberto Giolito commented on the project: "Design is architecture in motion and this brilliant and airy project is still revolutionary today. It took time to choose between different documents in order to decipher sketches and studies. It was crucial to have the right people at work, who mediated between the creative and the industrial production aspects. Taking a car from a simple sketch to a full-size vehicle is quite a job“.
Photo: motor1.com
