I’m an aircraft designer originally. I’ve never thought of myself as a product designer. I started working with sculpture and then cars. However, I soon realised that trying to be an artist who designed cars was impossible within such a commercial industry. So I went to the L’Ecole Polytechnic and the Sorbonne in Paris to study and I became a rather well-known aerodynamicist.

Luigi Colani

When I’m drawing, I’m building up from one to three dimensions and then the power of my ideas, born within the process of working through the three dimensions, can be released. I feel that young designers who rely only on the computer and its possibilities are not able to go all the way; they are limited. When the computer can completely and naturally ‘think’ in three dimensions then it will be more powerful.

Luigi Colani

China is still a very young culture when it comes to design. Although they are very familiar with computer technologies, they are very new to conceptual training. As a professor, I try hard to encourage them to draw, the old art of drawing and sculpting in three dimensions. When a student designs something like a handle on their computer screen and when you touch it later, it often feels wrong. But when you start with a piece of clay, sculpt the handle and then you put your hand around it, it’s absolutely perfect. It’s only then that I tell my students they should start to put the design into the computer for digitising. That’s the right way.

Luigi Colani

Well, I think they have to earn their ‘soup’ to survive — this is the part-prostitution that exists in every designer’s life. You have to say ‘yes’ to everything at first to earn money. But the real difficulty comes when you start to become successful; then you must start to say ‘no’. That’s what I did and I’ve stayed glued to my convictions.

Luigi Colani

We are all victims, even critical eyes like mine, because we are surrounded by commercials and so we buy any old rubbish that’s around. We have to regain our ability to be [discerning] and this can only be done if we get nearer to nature. If you look closely, nature immediately starts to correct its own design flaws and so the things that survive are nearly perfect — look at fish, specifically sharks and mantas. We are too far away from nature and so we can’t critically differentiate between good and bad design. People are buying stupid stuff because they don’t know any better.

Luigi Colani

What is ‘Modernism’ exactly? It’s been so confused over the years that it’s lost any real meaning. There are very few ideas from the Bauhaus that survived in their original form. Gropius’ heritage and vision for the Bauhaus included vivid colours in his manifesto — red, blue, yellow. [Colani draws a picture of a circle, pyramid and square stacked vertically — the symbolic logo of the Bauhaus.] But what happened through the ages? There was suddenly no work using the form of the circle or pyramid. Just the square, steel and glass and no colour! This is only 33% Bauhaus.

Luigi Colani

In the past, using fibreglass has given my work 100% freedom. You take Styrofoam blocks, cut the shape with hot wire, sculpt roughly, then mould with a wire brush and sandpaper, pour fibreglass into the mould then clean and paint. It’s absolutely free but we’ve realised that it is not an environmentally sustainable material so we have started to work with wood and bamboo. Bamboo does not give you the same freedom but it grows at an incredible rate and so it makes an extremely sustainable building material. We are also ‘farming’ bamboo that is very strong, extremely light and, of course, utilising only air and water to grow — it is the building material of the future!

Luigi Colani

I built the first streamline truck in 1971, as a direct response to the world oil crisis yet nobody noticed my design. They didn’t get the message. Earth is going into crisis because we are not reacting the way we should. Look at the automobile industry! I am the world record holder with a four-seater car that used 1.7 litres of fuel over a 100km distance and that was twenty years ago but nobody took notice. Today the industry continues to market enormous cars that use more and more fuel — it’s crazy, they just don’t get the message that we have to react immediately!

Luigi Colani

In its current form, I don’t believe there is a future for design. Designers tomorrow must be three-dimensional philosophers. They must ask themselves questions. Are we doing the right thing? Are we employing the materials as intelligently as we should? When historians revisit this century, it will be called the ‘criminal century’ and our legacy will be excessive consumption and environmental disaster — it’s terrible! To remain optimistic, the only choice for designers is to go back to nature, we must build with natural materials.

Luigi Colani

I believe that all good design is naturally erotic. However, the western world and America particularly, talk about sex constantly and yet are completely removed from its natural significance to our humanity. In contrast, in Asian society it’s very unusual to discuss sex publicly and yet their culture is full of soft, erotic shapes, sounds, smells and music. The result is that their culture seems one that is floating in harmony and I think we can learn from this.

Luigi Colani

Ross is an enormous human being and I love his work — sometimes he gets too far away from nature in my opinion, but that is very rare. We collaborate occasionally on projects. Recently I made a large sculpture at my workshop for his exhibition in Tokyo, because his studio couldn’t accommodate the huge scale required. We respect each other as designers and I think Ross is a future giant of the industry.

Luigi Colani

Well, we don’t have any tradition at all. I believe that people who have traditions are narrow-minded. My day is very simple and starts like this: I get up early seven days a week, I go to the baker and put on the coffee, then I go to the studio and see what the team has done the day before — I’m the ‘Hausmeister’ if you like. Then when the team arrives at 8am, we sit and discuss for an hour or two, eating and drinking and having a conversation about everything — politics, philosophy and the products they are working on. We are a team that looks into the future and sometimes we work on projects that might take twenty years or more to be realised. So it is a very slow process and it’s important that we enjoy being together. At 10am I go to my own studio and work until late at night. I need to work alone; sculpting and drawing. In that respect, I am a lone elephant!

Luigi Colani