CHIAVARI, Italy – There is an instinctive quality, an
innate ability to grasp the soul of an object that some product designers have.
It is the secret ingredient that separates design leaders from design
followers, and Battista Farina, better known as Pinin Farina, car designer
extraordinaire, had this talent. He single handedly reinvented the concept of
the auto, moving it from a square box on wheels to a thing of beauty.
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| Battista "Pinin" Farina |
In March 2002, Battista "Pinin" Farina was
inducted into the European Automotive Hall of Fame in Geneva,
Switzerland. He is in the company of other dedicated men who have made
automotive history: Henry Ford; the Michelin brothers Andrè and Edouard; and
the man who built the first practical high-compression engine with an ignition,
Nikolaus Otto.
"The influence of Pinin Farina on the automotive
industry,” wrote Rick Johnson, Editor of Automotive News Europe, “has been
profound. Thanks to the combination of genius, courage and farsighted
determination, men like Pinin Farina set the standard for the world of the
car."
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| 1936 Lancia Astura |
In 1893 when Battista Farina was born, the family
lived in the small farming community of Cortanze d’Asti, in the region of
Piedmont, in northern Italy. He was the 10th of his parent’s 11
children and they called him “Pinin”, or “baby” in Piedmontese dialect. In the early
1900’s the family moved to the city of Turin, to find work.
It was a time of technical exploration, and
mechanization was rapidly changing people's lives, even if not all of the new
developments were greeted with open arms. The future was uncertain and many new
inventions, like the airplane, were thought to have no future at all.
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| 1947 Alfa Romeo 6C "Golden Arrow" |
Even the auto was looked at as a passing fancy,
a plaything for the privileged few as there were few autos being built and they
were very expensive. But Pinin was convinced that the wave of the future
was in the engineering industry, and that those noisy, smelly jalopies would
quickly become an integral part of society.
He was not alone. Others, like Giovanni Agnelli, the
founder of Fiat; Vincenzo Lancia; and later still, Henry Ford thought so too.
But the style of the times, like the architects and designers who created them,
had come out of the old school of design. Their projects were overly decorated,
cluttered, primped and festooned with needless ornaments. It was a look Pinin
detested. He had other ideas. He thought cars should be clean and beautiful,
and once they were beautiful, he believed they would take on an identity of
their own.
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| Interior 1947 Alfa Romeo 6C |
In the early thirties Italy was changing from an
agricultural based society to a manufacturing society. The latest fashions from
Paris were now the rage, and new and innovative products were popping up almost
daily in the marketplace. The radio became the medium of the masses, bringing
news of the world into people's homes, and young film directors like Vittorio
De Sica and Roberto Rossellini were packing them in at the local movie
houses on Saturday nights. In the practically motionless old-world society
that was Italy, suddenly everyone was caught up in a fast push to the future.
The square, sober shapes of the past gave way to
low-slung, racy, rounded lines. Times were changing and autos were no longer
mere playthings for the wealthy. People were on a quest for speed. After
centuries of slow they wanted to go faster, and they wanted go faster now.
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| 1935 Alfa Romeo |
Battista Farina was also fascinated with the idea of
speed. He reasoned that the principles of aerodynamics were the most natural
way to solve the automobile's identity problem. He made his first visit to America
in 1920, where he met with Henry Ford.
The family says that Ford, who was cranking out Model
T's by the millions by then, asked Farina to come work for him. Instead, Farina
returned to Italy. Using what he had learned in America, Farina took a Lancia
chassis, added traditional Italian style, and developed a new version of the
Astura. The results were dramatic. He was on a roll.
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| 1947 Cistalia 202 C |
As soon as World War II ended, he set up a
workshop/laboratory in Torino. He named his new venture Pininfarina, combining
his first and last names. The workshop started turning out auto bodies, and it
didn't take long before the company began to attract international attention.
In 1947 he presented the Cistalia 202 SC to the
public and it was quickly declared a work of art, a "rolling
sculpture". The original model was placed on permanent display at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it still is today.
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| Ad for the American Nash |
After the success of the Cistalia, he presented
prototypes of two other autos, the Bentley and the American Nash. A
couple of years later, when Pinin Farina went back to the United States to
launch his new models, he was thrilled to see his name, and fame as an
international designer, used as the basis of Nash's national advertising
campaign. He had become a celebrity.
Pinin Farina often said that when he started working
with Enzo Ferrari back in 1951, he had no idea where the relationship would
take him. Ferrari, the irascible motor guru from Maranello, was also captivated
by speed and fascinated by the aerodynamic bodies Pinin Farina was designing.
They two men struck a deal.
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| 2002 Ferrari 550 Barchetta |
The task of designing the Ferrari car bodies was
turned over to Pinin's son, Sergio. Starting with the Ferrari 212 Inter
Cabriolet in 1952 to the 550 Barchetta Pininfarina in 2002, the autos produced
through a half a century of the Ferrari-Farina collaboration are beautiful
enough to leave even the most die-hard taxi takers like me breathless. Ferrari
would later admit, albeit reluctantly, that the jump in auto sales from 81 in
1956 to 1,246 just five years later was most likely due to Pininfarina’s
designs.
Still today, the name Pininfarina is on just about
everything that moves, from buses and trams to trucks, motorcycles, and even
Lavazza coffee machines, Italy's Telecom Sirio 2000 Basic Telephone, Mizuno
golf clubs, and Snaidero Ola kitchens. The list of exceptional cars designed by
Pininfarina is much too long for this short space, but the names include the
classic 1990 Alfa Romeo Spider, 1993 Coupè Fiat, 1992 Ferrari 456 GT, and
actually just about every automobile worth talking about.
