American Prizefor Design 2019

Candidates for the Prize are sent to The Chicago Athenaeum by design practitioners, press, and educators from around the world and the Museum’s International Advisory Committee, composed of such notable world designers as Richard Meier, Adrian Smith, John Marx, James von Klemperer, Santiago Calatrava, Serqei Tchoban, Graft Architects, and the late Alessandro Mendini.

The Committee’s decisions are based on core criteria: design excellence, innovation, and contributions to humanity and to the public good. The American Prize for Design is the highest and most prestigious design award in the United States.

Previous Laureates include Gorden Wagener, Chief Designer and Executive Vice President at Daimler AG. and British architect/designer Sir Norman Foster.

This year’s public accolade to this visionary Italian designer is long overdue.

Manzoni is truly a visionary that pushes the design edge further than most.

For two decades, he has been a young, driven, enthusiastic new force in the world’s design community—setting a very high and visionary standard for design from everyday cars to a futuristic spaceship and other personal objects such as a Hublot watch.

The fact that he is the design director for Ferrari, the man behind the creation of the mythical four-wheeled hypercars—hasn’t changed him; he is still grounded as ever and creating beautiful designs.

His design for LaFerrari, the first Ferrari hybrid, represents the pinnacle of Ferrari production cars. The design is extremely fascinating because it represents the highest level of technological transfer from Formula 1 to the road. This is a project that gathers all of the most important innovations developed in recent years at Ferrari. All the state-of-the-art technology combined with sleek styling is in there.

Manzoni has not only won numerous GOOD DESIGN Awards and other top German and Italian honors, his designs soar with a creative edge that is unparalleled in today’s design thinking and creativity. It’s not enough for him to simply create something beautiful, but to achieve a true union of technology and aesthetics.

Flavio Manzoni was born in Nuoro (Sardinia, Italy), in 1965, and holds a Degree in Architecture, specializing in Industrial Design, from the University of Florence. After gaining professional experience in the fields of architecture and industrial design, Manzoni joined Fiat Auto in 1993 as a designer at the Lancia Styling Centre, taking responsibility for interiors in 1996.

From 1999 to 2001, Manzoni filled a similar position at the Seat Styling Centre in Spain. While he was at Seat, Manzoni worked on the interiors of the Tango, Salsa, Leon, and Altea.
In November 2001, Manzoni returned to Fiat Auto, as head of the Lancia Styling Centre. In March 2004, he took responsibility for the Fiat Styling Centre.

Among other elements, he has developed the Maserati 3200 GT and the Dialogos concept car, coordinating the projects for the Lancia Ypsilon and Musa and the Granturismo, Stilnovo and Fulvia Coupe concept cars. Where the Fiat brand is concerned, he has worked on the projects Punto and Fiat 500.

Manzoni moved to Design at the Audi brand group on December in 2006 where he was appointed Director of Creative Design Volkswagen.

At Volkswagen, he designed the Volkswagen Golf Mk6 and defined the new vision of the Volkswagen Skoda, Bentley, and Bugatti brands. He created famous concepts for the VW Up!, Space Up!, Space Up! Blue, e-Up! and the VW BlueSport roadster. Among production cars, alongside Walter de Silva, he has designed the recent generation of VW cars, including the current Golf Mk7.

In 2010, he joined Ferrari as Head Designer; and has since overseen the designs of the company’s most recent masterpieces. He was assigned the task of reworking the identity for the Italian brand with the specific mission to create the new in-house Design Centre and setting up a comprehensive Ferrari Design Department including a model making area, a virtual design lab and hiring high-level specialists and professional designers.

As design director, he has been leading the style center team to develop the concept of the F12 Berlinetta presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 2012, and the LaFerrari presented at Paris Motor Show in the 2013, as his first projects.

In 2014, under his leadership, Ferrari was awarded the prestigious Compasso d’Oro for the F12Berlinetta; and in 2016, for the Ferrari FXXK.

Also in 2014 on Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, his FXXK was presented as the most powerful Ferrari ever. Although partially based on the very first hybrid car produced in Maranello, LaFerrari, the FXXK is in fact a completely new car.

In 2016-2017, he won five GOOD DESIGN Awards for the Ferrari 488 Spider, Ferrari F12tdf, Ferrari GTC4Lusso, Ferrari J50, and Ferrari 812 Superfast.

In 2017 under his direction the Ferrari GTC4Lusso won the award “Most Beautiful Supercar of the Year,” by the jury of the International Automobile Festival in Paris.
In 2018, Manzoni presented the Ferrari SP38 Debora at the Grand Basel Show demonstrating his great passion for design.

Also, in 2018, he received the design award for concept cars & prototypes at the Concorso d’Eleganza di Villa d’Este for the Ferrari SP38.

“It’s so important,” Manzoni states, “to show the shape of a car as it was intended, as a masterpiece or a work of art. These presentation frames are great at stimulating contemplation – normally, we’re used to seeing cars in noisy and chaotic environments. But here, there’s nothing but the car, its name, and its date. There are no distractions.”

Other important, hallmark designs by Manzoni include: SEAT Tango (2001), Lancia Fulvia Coupé (2003), Lancia Ypsilon (2003), Volkswagen Scirocco, Volkswagen BlueSport Concept, Volkswagen Golf VI and VII, Ferrari SP30 (2012) (One off), Ferrari F12berlinetta (2012), Ferrari 458 Speciale (2013), Ferrari LaFerrari (2013). Ferrari California T (2014), Ferrari F12 TRS (One off) (2014), Ferrari SP275RW (2016) (One off), Ferrari Portofino (2017), Ferrari FXX K Evo (2017), Ferrari 488 Pista (2018), Ferrari SP38 (2018), and Ferrari 488 Pista Spider (2018).

His most recent designs include: Ferrari Monza SP1 (2019), Ferrari F8 Tributo and Ferrari P80/C (2019). While designing for distinctly German Audi and Volkswagen brands, there remains something distinctively Italian about his work.

“I found Italian 1970’s design inspiring, especially the so-called ‘Tecno-chic’ style (a definition that I like using also to describe VW’s new aesthetic) a design that, thanks to the skilled work carried out by such architects as Marco Zanuso, Richard Sapper, the Castiglioni brothers (to mention only a few) made the Italian approach to style and to ‘social aesthetic’ famous in the world,” he said.

However, Manzoni does not look into the past as much as to the future.

“Instead, in recent years, especially in the last 20 years, the retro design trend has become overused,” declares Manzoni.

“Every company was making retro products. For me this was very bad because I wanted to design the future. And now I have this opportunity, together with the Ferrari Design team, because we always try to set a new standard, to raise the bar, with a very iconic and modern language.”

“Especially our criterion of simplicity and of “less is more”, that is undoubtedly in countertendency in regards to the need for surprise, the access of ‘baroquisms’ and the use of adornments that characterize today’s trend.”

“Quotations are fine when they are discreet and do not prejudice the object’s modernity,” he adds.

While maintaining a huge respect for Ferrari’s heritage, he does not subscribe to the retro trend, but instead designs to create some of Ferrari’s future classics.

Manzoni does not just design for the super-rich, he has also designed many projects for the market.

In 2007, he designed Up! for Volkswagen, a concept car, but also a new concept, production-oriented vehicle, perfectly to being interpreted with essentiality and purity, features that characterized great past masterpieces.

Being a citycar, the interpretation of a new family feeling is intentionally more expressive and humorous, and more “human.”

With the same design bravado, Manzoni also designs on the smaller scale.

His designs for the Swiss watch company, Hublot share many trademark characteristics of the car manufacturer.

With passion and ultimate creativity, Manzoni is always drawing; sketching with strong conviction and vigorous foresight.

Starting as a child, he always drew, mostly influenced by his father who was also an architect; so, he was surrounded by immense creativity and sketches and drawings all his life.

“My father was an architect”, testifies Manzoni, “and he was born with a natural instinct for art. I just absorbed it as a way to communicate, like a language.”

“Design is a meta-language and I openly advocate for an approach to design reflecting every purpose and every choice in a clear and comprehensible way, without rhetoric or over-styling,” he continues.

One of his recent pet projects was a study for a Ferrari-inspired spaceship, a creative exercise for his team in looking to the future for inspiration.

The ambitious, futuristic UFO from sketches to rendering is called LaFerrari Spacecraft. If you are a Ferrari aficionado, you’ll know futuristic supercars such as FXX K and LaFerrari were born from Manzoni sketches, this time he explores his curiosity for a futuristic spaceship that still demonstrates Italian traditions.

In this project, Manzoni reached into his curiosity about extra-terrestrials and science fiction to realize a spaceship concept.

Manzoni’s spaceship inspirits movies like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the classic comic series Flash Gordon and TV shows like Ufo and Space: 1999.

Much of the forms also come from influences that date back to ‘70s industrial designers, including Joe Colombo and Pierre Paulin.

The small spaceship includes front and rear spoiler recognizable from other road car Ferraris.

The concept is divided into two fluid shells: the upper shell including two lateral wings swooping down toward the rear thus increasing the dynamic thrust; the lower shell is simply supporting the upper shell so further increasing the sensation of speed and fluidity of the total design. The side project could possibly give the world a small glimpse into the direction of Ferraris to come. This futuristic spacecraft concept began as just idle sketching, but soon, it turned into out-hours design project.

“I tried to imagine something that can fly into the future,” states Manzoni, “and I focused on creating a little craft that’s different from my childhood dream.” The project is actually just fun creative exercise for his team to stay focus toward future design trends rather than the past. Manzoni explains that he wants to imagine something futuristic and flying since there’s going to be less space on the ground, so, in the future, there’s a big possibility that we use an aircraft just like a car. Manzoni’s spaceship is a kind of provocation to look to the future.

The designer adds: “We have to design cars and products that reflect progress and evolution.” “This is also a reflection of our trust regarding the future, because when I was young there was this strong trust in that the future was something to look forward to.”