Marcello Gandini Design

Marcello Gandini Design
legal form	Corporation (Srl)
founding	1980
Seat	Turin , Italy
Branch	Automotive design

Marcello Gandini Design Srl is an Italian design studio that is primarily concerned with the design of automobiles. The company was founded by the Turin-based automobile designer Marcello Gandini , who had previously been chief designer at Bertone . Marcello Gandini Design is a service provider for numerous Italian and French automobile manufacturers.

Company history

Distinguishing features of later Gandini designs: trimmed rear wheel arches (here Maserati Quattroporte IV)

The designer Marcello Gandini, born in Turin in 1938, worked for Carrozzeria Bertone from 1965, where he replaced the previous chief designer Giorgetto Giugiaro . Until 1980 he designed high-performance sports cars such as the Lamborghini Miura and its successor Countach as well as series vehicles such as the Alfa Romeo Montreal , the Fiat 132 and the first series of the BMW 5 series for Bertone .

In 1980 Gandini set up his own design studio near Turin. The seat of the company was a former outbuilding of the Abbey of Sant'Antonio di Ranverso . Marcello Gandini limited himself to pure design services; unlike many of its competitors, his company did not build the corresponding prototypes.

In the first few years the company was still closely associated with Bertone; Gandini carried out detailed work for current projects on Bertone's behalf. This initially included the body of the Citroën BX presented in 1982 , which was a further development of the Reliant FW11 designed by Gandini in 1977 . Gandini's first completely own project was the revision of the Renault 5 , which was partially marketed in France with the addition of Supercinq . From 1985 there was a connection with the sports car manufacturer Maserati , headed by Alejandro de Tomaso , for whom Gandini initially revised Pierangelo Andreani's design of the two-door biturbo . The Biturbo modified by Gandini was sold as the Maserati 222 and 222 E from 1988 . Building on this, Gandini developed a number of other models in the Biturbo family at the end of the 1980s, such as the Shamal and Ghibli sports cars . The last Maserati designed by Gandini was the Quattroporte IV with biturbo technology. In addition to his work for Maserati, Gandini designed the sixteen-cylinder sports car Cizeta V16T and the Countach successor Lamborghini Diablo in 1988 , in which he only slightly modified the Cizeta design. In the 1990s, Gandini developed the De Tomaso Bigua , which later became the Qvale Mangusta, as well as a concept vehicle called the Stole.

One of the distinguishing features of the cars designed by Gandini since the late 1980s was the truncated rear wheel arches.

In the 21st century, Marcello Gandini Design was not only concerned with vehicle design, but also with architecture, nightclub interiors and helicopters; Among other things, the company designed the pulpit for the Heli-Sport CH-7 .