The Italian Line: Ghia Part 2 ——From Custom to Corporate

We resume our review of Ghia's landmark cars with the prototype 2nd generation Dual-Ghia* first exhibited in 1960. Virgil Exner's design was translated by Sergio Sartorelli into a low, sleek semi-fastback coupe.  Frontal treatment echoed the first generation... 

…while the rear, with its horizontal ledge and scooped upper lights, had some themes that would appear on Plymouth and Dodge production cars from 1960 and '61.  The canted wheel cutouts would show up on some Plymouths and Dodges as well.  Prices  were double that of the first generation, and this, along with the retirement of  Dual Motors' Gene Casaroll, limited sales of the renamed, Ghia-built L6.4 to just 26 units.  

"Production" versions had a roofline roughly 1" higher than this prototype.  Customers may have been few, but they were satisfied with the quality of Ghia's efforts.  

Sergio Sartorelli deployed some of the same themes on his design for Fiat's 2300 and 2300S GT coupes, which went into production in 1961, the same year as the L6.4.  These included the glassy greenhouse with wraparound backlight, the vented front fenders, and the horizontal ledge wrapping around the deck...

It was a handsome, well-mannered car, and it outsold the Ghia L6.4 by a factor of several hundred.  This meant that produciton of bodies had to be outsourced to OSI, Ghia's mass-production offshoot.

Sartorelli also designed the second generation Type 34 Karmann Ghia for Ghia, and this was produced by Karmann starting in 1962.  Like many European cars of the period, the Type 34 K-G showed some Corvair influence in that horizontal ledge encircling the body, and Sartorelli's move of wrapping the ledge around the inboard lights at the front is a somewhat unconvincing detour...

His design for a one-off 1962 Maserati 5000GT Ghia built for Sr. Innocenti, of motor scooter and small car fame, was more convincing in form and detail.  The low, undecorated form and glassy roof may provide the best proportions on any of these rare cars.

The ovoid wheel arches may have inspired those on the 1964 Pontiac GTO.

Sartorell's design for the Fiat 1500 GT Ghia fastback rappeared in 1962, and went into production the following year. The use of the chromed grille surround as a front bumper was simple and effective.  Over 800 copies left the factory...

Sartorelli's design for a successor to the Fiat 2300S remained a one or two-off, as Fiat elected to follow up their 2300S with the Fiat Dino.  But Hollywood producer Burt Sugarman fell in love with the car, and commissioned Ghia to build a convertible version of Sartorelli's Ghia 230S fastback, only with a Chrysler 273 V8 plunked into the Fiat chassis. Giorgetto Giugiaro took over as Ghia design chief during 1965, and arrived in time to supervise the conversion, designing an optional hardtop. The gently curved lower body of the resulting Ghia 450SS*, with its subtly creased flanks, retained Sartorelli's lines...

The rear bumper wraps up around the flat tail panel just as on the Fiat 1500 GT.  Owing to financial and production woes, fewer than 60 of these cars made it to customers from 1966 to 1967...

The same could be said of the De Tomaso Vallelunga*, that car builder's first effort at a production car. Three alloy-bodied prototypes were made in 1964 at Fissore before production of the design was moved to Ghia's shops in 1965. While the designer was not credited, the proportions of the mid-engined, Ford inline four-powered coupe echo those of the Fissore-bodied Elva-BMW GT160 from the same period; it was designed in-house by Trevor Fiore. That car had the same low beltline and glassy fastback..

But the Elva BMW GT lacked the curved side glass and sheer flanks, uninterruped by creases or vents, of the Vallelunga.  One eventual owner of a Vallelunga, Tom Matano, admired its clean form so much he said it inspired some of his thoughts on his design for the first Mazda Miata...

In November 1966 at the Turin Auto Show, Ghia wowed the crowds with the Maserati Ghibli.  Named after a hot North African wind, it followed the Mistral and fit Maserati's slogan, "A Car Like the Wind."  Giorgetto Giugiaro's design substituted sharply defined contours and plane changes and deftly controlled proportions for surface decoration.  It sent the pattern for future front-engined GT cars, foreshadowed the trend to more angular forms, and went into production by spring of 1967.

By the time I saw one at the Paris Auto Salon in October 1970, the Ghibli was a familiar sight to showgoers, but it still looked like a fresh idea to me...

At the rear as well as front, sharp delineation of surface edges and incised lines continue, with a recessed panel surrounding the gas filler reducing the blockiness of the rear quarter.  The front edge of the C-pillar aligns roughly with the wheel center.  Giugiaro's handling of proportions and form imparts a sense of motion throughout...

Real motion was provided by a 4-cam V8 with alloy block, in either 4.7 or 4.9 liter sizes.  A dry sump was used in order to allow a low hood line. In 1969 a Ghibli Spyder was added to the line, sometimes equipped with an optional hardtop. The wire wheels shown on our example were almost an anachronism when they appeared as an option on the Ghibli, and were less effective visually and in handling dynamic loads than the alloy wheels shown on our other examples.  The Ghibii had at least 330 hp to transmit to the road, and it was not a lightweight car...

The De Tomaso Mangusta was also V8-powered, but the Ford engine was mid-mounted behind the cabin.  Giugiaro was also the author of this design, which made its debut at the same Turin show as the Ghibli, doubtless leaving onlookers bewildered as to what might be the most stunning new car there.  

Silver, Giugiaro's favorite show car color, showed off the creased, tightly contoured lines better than red.  Giugiaro emphasized the rear wheels and sloped the windshield steeply to impart a relentlessly purposeful form.

The butterfly engine lids dictated twin outer backlights; inside, a vertical backlight separated the passenger cabin from the engine, while deeply recessed vents in the lids echoed those aft of the side windows.  Note how the horizontal crease dividing the upper and lower flanks is roughly tangent to the wheel tops.  Rear tires were larger than fronts, and the design benefitted from the designer's disinclination to add anything like practical bumpers at the rear...

…or any bumpers at the front, where the simple, forward-canted air intake opening tightly surrounded 4 round headlights that were 2 oblong units in Giugiaro's original sketch for rival maker Iso.  For Iso the car was a lost opportunity, but it put De Tomaso on the map as a car maker.  It went into production in autumn of 1967, the year De Tomaso rescued Ghia from a brief ownership by dilettante ex-dictator Ramfis Trujillo.  Just over 400 Mangustas would be made before a bigger project consumed De Tomaso's, and Ghia's, attention.

That bigger project was not this Ghia-bodied Oldsmobile Thor, though it was a sign of the increasing interest that big car companies beyond Chrysler and VW were taking in Ghia.  The Thor, which appeared in 1967, was commissioned by GM Styling Chief Bill Mitchell.  Giugiaro draped a low, glassy form over the Toronado mechanicals, and the result upstaged the GM original which had appeared the previous year.  GM failed to follow Ghia's lead, however, and their own revisions to the original Toronado spoiled its freshness after 1967.

Corporate brass at Ford were not as shy in putting a Ghia design into serious production. The Mangusta had attracted their attention, and Lee Iacocca approached De Tomaso about a more practical production version of the Mangusta idea.  Ford  bought Ghia in 1970 and Giugiaro had left Ghia to start his own firm, so new chief designer Tom Tjaarda*, recently arrived from Pininfarina, handled design chores. The new Pantera, above, was built at Vignale, also owned by Ford: it overlapped the end of Mangusta production and went on sale in the US in the spring of 1971.  Over 5,600 were built during its US run, which ended in 1974.

Tjaarda also proposed a front-engined Ford V8-powered coupe which could have provided a lower-cost alternative to Maserati's Ghibli, but Ford was preoccupied with the Pantera, and Iso had changed from GM to Ford as an engine supplier for its own front-engined GTs, so the Zonda shown above remained a one-off.

So did the intriguing 1981 AC-Ghia*, based on the mid-engined 3000ME chassis with its trnsverse-mounted Ford V6. The compact, distintively rounded wedge form of the Ghia provided the ME chassis something the AC original lacked: a coherent visual identity.  It was one of two 3000ME chassis provided to Ghia in a project hatched by Bob Lutz and Karl Ludvigsen. The other chassis had its wheelbase lengthened by 11 inches and became the Lincoln Quicksilver, shown below. Nobody had ever seen a Lincoln like this one, a mid-engined luxury sedan with a smooth, low form that seemed more Citroen than Ford.  Like the AC-Ghia, it was a drivable, fully-functioning car, not just a show exercise.  After touring the show circuit, both AC-based prototypes were sadly forgotten.

After the Ford takeover, the name Ghia was applied for awhile to denote the top trim level on a number of relatively uninspired Ford products that had no Ghia design involvement.  There were some inspired concept cars, however, and one of these was the stunning 1992 Ghia Ford Focus* designed by Taru Lahti at Ghia, and built there as a fully-functioning car on an all-wheel-drive Escort RS Cosworth chassis. Organic forms were echoed in details that were almost eerily reminiscent of deep-sea monsters, a perfect place to conclude our study of Ghia.  Have a safe and happy Halloween (yet another reason to wear a mask) and remember that it's too late to mail in your vote, so please vote in person or use a ballot box by Tuesday, November 3rd...

*Footnote:  For a brief history of Ghia-bodied cars from the late Forties through the Fifties, see our previous chapter, "The Italian Line: Ghia Part 1—International Style", posted on 10-22-20. Dual-Ghia history is reviewed in that post as well as one from August 29, 2015: "What Defines a Production Car, and Why Would Anybody Pay $3 Million for One?"  The unlikely saga of the Ghia 450SS was told here in "Foreshadowing Fiat Chrysler: Ghia 450SS", on 3-14-16. De Tomaso's Vallelunga is examined in more mechanical and visual detail in "Hillsborough Concours Part 1", in our archives for 7-26-18. Tom Tjaarda's work for Ghia is further explored in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 4:  Tom Tjaarda—Life Before and After the Pantera", posted 4-30-20.  The AC 3000ME appears in "AC Part 4: Shelby's Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow", posted on 8-20-17.  And Ghia's Ford Focus concept car is examined in more detail in "Nineties Concept Cars Part 1", from 12-30-18.

Color Photo Credits:  
Maserati Ghibli at Paris Auto Show:  Ronald Budde

All other color photos are by the author.

Monochrome Photo Credits:   

Karmann Ghia Type 34 front / side:  classics.honestjohn.co.uk

Karmann Ghia Type 34 side / rear:  Volkswagen AG

Fiat 1500GT front / side:  hobbydb.com

Maserati Ghibli Spider:  maseratiusa.com

Lincoln Quicksilver:  Ford Motor Company

All other monochrome images are from Carrozzeria Ghia.

The Italian Line: Ghia Part 1, International Style

Turin's Carrozzeria Ghia was founded by Giacinto Ghia and his partner, a Sr. Cariglio, as World War I raged, in 1916.  Ghia gained fame making lightweight, alloy-bodied racers like tha Alfa Romeo 6C 1500 that won the 1929 Mille Miglia.  Giacinto died in 1944, and the company was bought by Mario Boano and a partner, Giorgio Alberti.  They faced the task of rebuilding the factory demolished by aerial bombardment, and two of Boano designs for the reconstituted firm expressed a kind of futurist optimism.  The Alfa 6C 2500 Sport Cabriolet below won the grand prize at the 1948 Monte Carlo concours.  The Delahaye 135 MS coupe that appeared the next year appears below it, and shares the same fully skirted wheels with hinged covers, and similar flowing fender forms to avoid the slab-sided look of early envelope bodies.  Ghia built similar bodies on Fiat and Talbot chassis. As with some prewar bodies by Figoni and Falaschi, the cars appear to float above the road, in a way that denies the visual importance of wheels.

That wasn't the case with a Ghia Alfa that appeared next. Giovanni Savonuzzi was also designing for Ghia during this period, and his concept for the Alfa Romeo 2500 SS coupe went in another direction from Boano's designs on the Alfa and Delahaye for Ghia.  Perhaps less influenced by futurist science fiction and prewar show cars from France or America, Michelotti offered a tightly-contoured, almost undecorated take on the Italian line that would predict its direction in the Fifties; this in 1949...

By 1950 Ghia had revised the nose with a new version of Alfa's traditional grille flanked by horizontal air intakes, and echoed these in the fender vents on the smooth flanks as well as adding door vent windows.  The '49 version's rounded  rear fenders were squared up for vertical tail lights, and the divided windshield was replaced by a smooth single-curved unit.  The name changed to Supergioiella, meaning "super jewel."

1950 was a busy year for Ghia, with new work bodying Lancias as well as Alfas.  Ghia built some of the last special bodies for the Lancia Aprilia, which would go out of production after 1949. These coupes and spiders cleverly integrate the traditional Lancia shield grille into the new aerodynamic envelope form, and the curving posts for the flat windshield might have inspired the one that would appear on the Austin Healey in a couple years...

Also in 1950, Ghia bodied a series of Ferraris, on the 2.3 liter 195 chassis that overlapped the 2 liter 166.  The design echoes some of the themes from competitor Pinin Farina's Cisitalia 202, with similar modeling of the rear fender forms and the low hood nested between the fenders. The grille design, with its raised center section, predicted later Aston Martins, and lost out to the simple oval with  eggcrate mesh that had appeared at Vignale and soon became a Ferrari trademark.

By 1951, Ferrari had enlarged their V12 to 2.6 liters with the 212 series, and Ghia made minor revisions to the body details, simplifying the grille to the familiar Ferrari oval shown below, and adding a notchback option to the fastback coupes and cabriolets they'd offered.  The body design was also adapted to a 340 fastback coupe that was raced in North America.

By this time Ghia had experience with coachwork on other large modern cars, and its collaboration with Chrysler, and Virgil Exner at Chrysler Styling, had led to a series of show cars beginning in 1950, including the Plymouth XX-500, the Chrysler K-310 and D'Elegance, and the DeSoto Adventurer. These projects led to the Chrysler Special shown below, of which six were produced for Chrysler, and another dozen built by Ghia for sale in Europe.  

Ghia  showed the Ferrari 212 below at the 1952 Paris Show.  It remained a one-off, but roof and fender forms showed up later on other Ghia efforts.  The car made its way to Argentina, where it was owned by President Juan Peron.

The fender lines of Ghia's 1953 Alfa Romeo 1900SS coupe reflected the fender forms of that Ferrari from the previous year, including the upward notch at the rear fender line. Similar profiles appeared on Pininfarina's Nash Healey in 1952. The roof line, however, seems a reference to the Supergioiello. Mario Boano left Ghia in 1953, and Luigi Segre took over as the firm's involvement with big industry players like Chrysler, Fiat and Volkswagen deepened.

The first of Giovanni Savonuzzi's Supersonic coupe bodies for Ghia appeared in the 1953 Mille Miglia on a Alfa 1900-powered Conrero racer which crashed.  The design attracted the attention of FIat, which had Ghia body 15 of their new 8V two-seaters; one of these is shown below.  While the futuristic Supersonic never went into serious production, it influenced the De Soto Adventurer II show car built for Chrysler, and one-off versions of the Supersonic design were mounted on Jaguar and Aston Martin chassis...

By the time the limited-production Chrysler Specials appreared, both Chrysler and Ghia were exploring something smaller and sportier that might form the basis of a production car.  The first Dodge FIrearrows appeared in 1953, and by 1954 there would be 4 cars, including two roadsters, the convertible below, and a coupe.  Chevy's Corvette had also appeared in '53, the Nash Healey had changed to Pinin Farina bodies the year earlier, and Ford's Thunderbird was on the horizon.

Virgil Exner's design reflected the clean contours and horizontality of the Ghia Supersonic, and like that Fiat, there was a V8 under the hood, but twice as big.  Exner was not able to persuade conservative Chrysler brass to authorize tooling up for full production, but limited production was launched in 1956 by Dual Motors of Detroit.  Ghia's Detroit liason, Paul Farrago, added bumpers and  a more user-friendly convertible top to the car, which was briefly renamed Firebomb.  By the time deliveries of the eventual 117 cars began, the team had wisely changed the name to Dual-Ghia*.

In 1955 Ghia exhibited the unique body below on the new Ferrari 375 chassis. This powerful coupe reflected the horizontality of the Firearrow / Firebomb twins, along with the nascent fins and big fender vents that would show up on the production model of those twins, the Dual- Ghia.  Ghia, already more successful in attracting Chrysler's attention than that of Ferrari or Maserati, was about to attract a commission from the maker of a much more modest product.  But it would be a large order...

Also in 1955, VW presented its new Karmann Ghia, a two-seater on the Type 1 (Beetle). chassis. Ghia had begun design work in 1953.  Owing to Ghia's small manufacturing capacity, production would be a collaboration with Karmann in Germany. The graceful styling was a collaboration by Luigi Segre, head of Ghia, and Mario Boano, Giovanni Savonuzzi, and Sergio Coggiola, none of whom would agree on who would get full credit.  By 1958 there was a cabriolet, but it lacked the charm of the harmonious greenhouse with its curves in plan and section.

That roof line, and especially the form of the rear fender which curves around the rear wheel and the continues as a raised surface across the door and front fender, replicates the shapes which appeared first on the Chrysler D'Elegance show car, designed by Virgil Exner and built by Ghia, which appeared in 1953, the year Ghia's team began work on the Karmann Ghia.  Paul Farrago, Ghia's ambassador to Detroit, later confirmed that Ghia's designers had lifted these themes intact from Exner's show car...

By 1964 the Karmann Ghia was such a success in the USA that VW was getting a bit cheeky in some of its ads.  There was the famous one with racing numbers stencilled on the car over the simple caption "You'd lose."  Another said it was so pretty you could tell the body wasn't built by VW.  By the end of production of the original Ghia design in 1974, over 445,000 had been built.  This humble VW established the Ghia name in America, prompted Volkswagen AG to commission an entirely new Ghia based on its new Type 3 chassis, and attracted the attention of some other big players on the international scene.  The story of what happened in the Swinging Sixties and beyond will be told in our next chapter…

Errata & Addenda:  We left out the caption for Juan Peron's Ferrari 212 at post time, and accidentally substituted text from another piece.  We fixed this early after posting, then added a photo showing how the Karmann Ghia's roof and fender lines were adapted from a much bigger Chrysler show car.  Apologies for an example of cut-and-paste gone astray...

*Footnote:  The Dual-Ghia saga is featured in our post from August 29, 2015: "What Defines a Production Car, and Why Would Anybody Pay $3 Million for One?"

Color Photo Credits:  
Alfa Supergioiello:  italiaspeed.com

Dodge Firearrow:  George Havelka

All other color photos are by the author.

Monochrome Photo Credits:   

Delahaye 135 MS:  en.wheelsage.org

Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 coupe:  italiaspeed.com
Lancia Aprilia spider:  carsfromitaly.net

Chrysler Special:  Chrysler Corporation

Ferrari 212 coupe:  Revs Institute, Rodolfo Mailander Collection

Fiat 8V Supersonic:  woiweb.com

Dual Ghia Firebomb prototype:  Dual Motors, Inc. 

Ferrari 375 coupe:  Ghia
VW Karmann Ghia:  Volkswagen AG
Karmann Ghia ad:  Volkswagen of America, Inc.

All other monochrome images are from Carrozzeria Ghia.

The Jetsons in Boulder Part 4: Roger Easton's Modest Masterpiece——Lightness and Facts on the Ground

If you walk north on 16th Street, away from Boulder High School on Arapahoe, you'll pass this building on your right.  You may not notice it at first, as it sits well back from the street on a grassy plot generously shaded by trees.  Discreet black lettering on the white landscape wall identifies it as a dental office...

But when the building at number 1636 was completed in 1964, it served as office and design studio for its architect, Roger Easton.  It was an era of societal and technological change.  On July 2 of that year, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. 26 days later, NASA's Ranger 7 hit the surface of the Moon after sending home over four thousand detailed images, fulfilling one dream of Johnson's predecessor, JFK, who had advocated for a manned landing there.  It was a time of impersonal, steel and glass corporate architecture in American cities.  Several years later, Easton would design IBM's Boulder sales office building in steel, brick and glass, as a series of formal rectangles in plan and elevation.  For his own offices, though, the architect took a different approach...

There is discipline in the detailing and use of materials, but the composition of space, mass and light is informal and inviting.  You pass between the landscape wall to the south and the enclosed structure to the north and descend a series of steps that float between rocks and shrubs.   On the north edge of the property, a burbling creek, unseen in these photos, passes below glazed walls. The wall planes finished in exterior plaster are sheer and undecorated.

Instead of decoration. Roger Easton has deployed light, structure and attention to detail in a successful effort to relate the building to human scale. In the photos above and below, note the way windows wrap around inside and outside corners above the walls to separate those walls from the roof plane.  In this clerestory space between walls and roof, the open-web steel trusses supporting the concrete roof are visible.

At key passages, as shown in the views above and below, cantilevered bays float above the ground, with defining shadows below and those light-filled clerestories above. The eave was notched around that tree near the main entry in the original design. In an era when Buckminster Fuller urged architects to calculate the weight of their buildings, Easton's 1636 building rests lightly on the land, the horizontal lines and shade from deep eaves inviting you to linger in the garden...

Passing through the central courtyard to the offices at the rear of the building, you reach another stair of floating treads leading up to a landing that seems to float as well.  Based on the evidence provided by photos taken just after the building was completed, only the size of the imposing trees seems to have marked the passage of time.  The building itself has not suffered from modifications...

As you approach that landing, you notice that it is supported by a lightweight steel structure echoing that of the roof.  Repetition of details like this one lends unity to the building as a work of art.

Another detail that Easton repeated on both stairs is the steel channel serving as a handrail, with the inward-facing flange providing a convenient grip feature, and steel rods connecting the handrail to the concrete-surfaced, steel-edged treads...

Roger Easton died in March of this year at age 92.  His independent practice in Boulder spanned 35 years from 1960.  On the day I visited this building, smoke from none-too-distant fires provided a reminder that there's a cost to ignoring facts, and a short walk through Boulder's downtown provided some handy examples of ill-considered buildings shouting  for  our attention without anything like Easton's mastery of form and detail to back up their claims.  An artifact of an era when we believed science and engineering would build a happier tomorrow, 1636 Sixteenth still speaks of that confidence, a modest and quiet fact on the ground.

*Footnote:  For earlier photo essays on Mid-Century Boulder architecture, see "The Jetsons at Home in Boulder, Colorado (Part One)", posted on June 13, 2016, "The Jetsons in Boulder Part 2: Charles Haertling Masterworks", from July 2, 2016, and "The Jetsons in Boulder Part 3: Charles Haertling at Mid-Century and Beyond", from June 30, 2020.

Photo Credits:
All photos are by the author.