Luigi Colani is one the great mavericks of 20th century design with an independent spirit, a flair for showmanship and a willingness to engage the wider public that has kept him utside the design mainstream. Colani has pursued an interest in imagining a world that does not yet exist – one of utopian architecture, high performance cars and huge supersonic aircraft flying many times the speed of sound. Certainly one of the most famous designers of our time, he is yet one of the most controversial as well. There are the ones who see him as a professional critic or a design entertainer, but there are also those who almost worship him as a genious and a philosopher. Whatever, he is undoubtedly a “man like a whirlwind” always leaving behind a creative chaos. Colani is not touchy about negative controversy and criticism; in his perception criticism in not negative. Quite to the contrary, he wants to awaken and give impulse. Thus he continues inexorably in his struggle for the round and natural forms, shapes and contours against the unnatural, angular, artificial surroundings: “Take a stone and throw it into the water, the stone is round, the trajectory is round, the circles in the water are round, our world is round and moves in a round orbit in harmony with billions of other round celestial bodies. Even in erotic, preserving continuity of life, we are aroused by round shapes. Why should I, a thinking man, imitate those who see our world as something angular? I continue in the struggle of Galileo Galilei, as my world is also round.”
Inspired by natural, organic forms, especially sea creatures, but also by explicit sexual imagery, Colani was an isolated voice during his early career in the 1950s and 1960s in his obsessive search for a design language that goes beyond the mundane functional world. Today the energy and exuberance of his shape making look much more at home in the context of ‘blob’ architecture and the complex curves made possible by digital technologies. Some creations, such as his Canon T90 camera and Cobra headphones for Sony, tea pots, mineral water bottles and sun glasses, have made the translation from concept to commercial products, but the majority of his inspired work remains in the form of dreamlike, organic models or photographic montages.
Born in Berlin on 2 August 1928 as Lutz Colani (he will change his name in Luigi in 1957), Colani studied sculpture and painting at the Berlin Kunstakademie; he embarked on his extraordinary career as a designer in the early 1950s when he moved to Paris to work as an illustrator in the advertising industry and where he produced a series of speculative ideas for cars, motorcycles and aircraft that combined new technology with new materials and which were styled to look ‘modern’ in the bleak context of post-war reconstruction. After studying aerodynamics at the Sorbonne and a period spent in the United States working for aircraft-maker Douglas, where he was able to study the use of new materials suitable for high speeds, in 1953 he moved to SIMCA in France where he developed the very first fully plastic carbody. And ever since, the design and use of plastic has played a crucial role in his cosmos. In 1955, Colani returned to his native Berlin, with a head full of great visions and a portfolio of international experience. Back in the former capital, he started to devise prize-winning chassis designs for high-end carbody makers Erdmann & Rossi and Rometsch. At the same time, he advanced his plastic designs and this culminated in the 1960s in his compact Colani GT sportscar, which was available as a DIY kit on a VW platform and swiftly emerged as an icon of life in the 1960s.
The plastic furniture Colani produced in the 1960s for German manufacturers made him a world-famous Pop star of design. In 1972, in the moated Castle Harkotten in Central West Germany, Colani established a “Designfactory” that gave a new shape to almost all spheres of life by bringing innovative design and revolutionary concepts to bear. Here Colani and his team used to work on several projects at the same time; an unusual characteristic for a studio within the context of an increasingly commercial design world. Driven by curiosity and experimentation beyond the need to simply satisfy a client, the studio might develop and then abandon a concept for years yet later return to similar themes. In the 1970s, Colani prepared studies for high-performance gliders ready to sail across the Atlantic, oil tankers with new types of propellers, ecological cars that set world records using only 1.7l of gas for 100 kilometers, not to mention epoch-making products for the ceramic and sanitary industries, brought to market by the likes of Villeroy & Boch, Grohe and Rosenthal. The VW corporation paid Colani immense sums to gaze into the future and compile studies for the autos of tomorrow for them, and allowed him to use their works wind tunnel to test his fuel-saving carbodies and his high-speed vehicles.
By this time, Colani was the best-known designer the world over – recognizable by his “Colani” signature on all his designs and products as well as by the biodynamic forms he created, modeled after nature itself. From 1982 until 1987 he lived in Japan, working for companies such Canon, the leading camera manufacturer of the day, Sony, the home electronics giant, and for carmakers Mazda, not to forget countless companies with a lifestyle focus. His SLR camera, the Canon T90, became world famous and in 1988 Cobra organically shaped headphones for Sony, the very first of their kind, were purchased for the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art. After his return in Europe, at his Research Studio in Bern in Switzerland, opened in 1986, he created visionary studies for supersonic airplanes, high-speed trains, bio-organic architectures, aerodynamic sports equipment, watches and jewelry. In 1989, his efforts climaxed in the presentation and tests of 13 streamlined vehicles on the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, where Colani caught the eye with his fuel-saving cars that set various land-speed records. In later years he palnned near Shanghai a city for scientists, which he called “Bio-City” since it was adapted in form and function to the human body and in 1995 became a professor at Tong-Ji University in Shanghai. Since 2002 there has been a Colani Research Center in Karlsruhe (Germany), where he currently resides. In 2008 Design Studio opened in Beihai (southern China), predicted to be the world’s fastest growing city from now to 2020.
“Whenever we talk about biodesign we should simply bear in mind just how amazingly superior a spider’s web is to any load-bearing structure man has made – and then derive from this insight that we should look to the superiority of nature for the solutions. If we want to tackle a new task in the studio, then it’s best to go outside first and look at what millenia-old answers there may already be to the problem.” Luigi Colani, 2007.
