Last week we reported extensively about Lamborghini celebrating 20 years of Centro Stile, the Italian brand’s internal styling department. We were also among the first outlets to tell the story of the stunning Lamborghini Manifesto concept, a design study unveiled this weekend during the Centro Stile celebrations at the Lamborghini Museum in Sant’Agata Bolognese.
The event was led by current Lamborghini design chief Mitja Borkert and attended by several of Lamborghini’s most influential figures and the wider VW Group, including the great Walter de Silva, who was instrumental in shaping the brand’s visual identity during its transformation in the Audi era.
Now, Lamborghini has delved deeper into how its design DNA has evolved and where it’s going. Relying on external design houses since the 1960s, Centro Stile was where Lamborghini’s modern identity was built from the ground up. Founded in the early 2000s and fully operational in 2005, it is built into the engineering and manufacturing process itself, making every line, curve and crease on a Lamborghini both emotionally charged and technically feasible.
“A modern super sports car company cannot rely solely on external studios. Design is the main reason why people buy a Lamborghini,” says Borkert, who has led the division since 2016. Cars such as Countach and Diablo, a model that will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2025, with their iconic wedge-shaped silhouette, designed by the great Marcello Gandini, have been a poster car for enthusiasts for decades. That same philosophy has guided each modern model from the Murciélago and Gallardo to the Revuelto and the new Temerario.
Within Centro Stile, 25 designers from all over the world bring the visual language of Lamborghini to life. They range from young digital modelers to veterans in their 50s who have seen the evolution from clay to Computer Aided Design (CAD).
Together, this diverse and multicultural team combines Italian style with global perspectives, Germans, Japanese, Americans, Poles and many more, working together on everything from aerodynamics to color, upholstery and ergonomics. They ensure that the brand’s signature design elements, such as the Y-shaped motifs and hexagonal elements, which reference Italian industrial design from the 1960s, continue to resonate in current and future models.
Borkert calls the design studio a ‘football team’, where everyone has a role and a shared goal: to remain immediately recognizable, but never predictable. His philosophy is based on three pillars: curiosity, recognizability and surprise. Curiosity keeps the team looking ahead, recognizability ensures continuity and surprise ensures that every new Lamborghini exceeds expectations.
To further foster that spirit, Borkert created a “crazy corner,” a small group tasked with imagining what the brand could look like in twenty years. Artificial intelligence now helps with visualization, but creative judgment remains human. Borkert adds that technology is a tool, but the final decision always lies with them.
This brings us to the aforementioned Manifesto concept, a sculpture on four wheels that brings the efforts and essence of Centro Stile into shape. Like the Terzo Millennio concept before it, which carried design cues from the Revuelto and the Temerario, the Manifesto acts as a platform that previews the design cues of future models.
Images: Automobili Lamborghini
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