Delving Deeper

EMBRACING CURVES
From cars to boats, furniture to piggy banks, cutlery for Thai Airlines to his Drop tea- pot and some desktop computing, Luigi Colani’s industrial design practice steadily evolved through the decades to create an almost all-encompassing orbit of consumer goods. In 1970 he established his own design firm at Harkotten Castle in Germany, from which he could also approach such large-scale commissions as airplanes and architectural projects. Throughout, his design sensibility has fundamentally remained the same, harnessing principles of physics and keenly observing nature as the engineer of optimal form. These practices materialize in rounded, aerodynamic shapes for efficiency and aesthetic balance. As he once said in a near manifesto: “The earth is round, all the heavenly bodies are round; they all move on round or elliptical orbits. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei’s philosophy: my world is also round.” His resulting work flows with constant energy, like a futurist painting made object or an Umberto Boccioni sculpture that you can sit in.