Lamborghini’s head of design, Filippo Perini explains how nature helped inspire the new Lambo.
One of the most stunning cars in New York for this year’s auto show was not to be found on the show floor of the Javits Center. Lamborghini’s Huracán LP 610-4 was shown Tuesday atBathhouse Studios, a former site of public baths on the Lower East Side that has been turned into a photo studio and event space.
The Huracán LP 610-4, successor to the Gallardo, has previously appeared on this continent only at the Amelia Island Concours d’Élégance after its introduction in March at the Geneva auto show. The Huracán (pronounced ur-ah-CAN) is named, like most Lamborghinis, for a fighting bull, and 610 refers to the horsepower generated by the naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10, which is also rated at 413 pound-feet of torque.
The company says it already has 300 orders from American buyers eager to commit about $240,000 before picking through the options list.
In New York to explain the design philosophy behind the new car was Lamborghini’s design chief, Filippo Perini, who offered a minilecture titled “Beauty: From the Magic of Nature to the Lamborghini Huracán.”
The new car is a softer, more curvaceous, more elegantly proportioned variation on Lamborghini’s aggressive faceted look. More in the tradition of the sleek Miura than the brutal Countach, it is built largely of carbon fiber. In an interview before his talk, Mr. Perini said the car was designed wholly on computers, without a clay model.
The magic of nature that inspires him, Mr. Perini said, is not flowers or leaves, but crystals. “I like crystals,” he said. “Sometimes you see minerals where they intersect. There is a bit of chaos there. We look at the intersection of volumes instead of lines in our cars.”
The thinking that went into the new design, he said, began one day when he was depressed by the quality of the work of the nine designers in his studio. “Everything they were drawing that week was ugly, ugly,” he said. “And then I thought, how do we know what is beautiful and what is ugly?”
Mr. Perini investigated. The sources of beauty, he concluded, are proportions like the Golden Section beloved by the ancient Greeks. He noted that almost everything in the Huracán is shaped around some form of hexagon, from interior gauges to headlight shapes. The hexagon, he pointed out, is the shape of some of the molecules of carbon fiber that Lamborghini is using in its cars. It is also a form found widely in nature, as in honeybee combs.
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The Design Inspiration Behind the Huracan
