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Miguel Gazzuli's Ducati M900 "monster". (courtesy Guggenheim Museum Soho) |
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| A Guggenheim curator talks about four of his favorite motorcycle
designs. by Ultan Guilfoyle Ducati M900 "Monster" As a young student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California--the crucible of American automotive design--Argentinean Miguel Galluzzi drew inspiration from the Tarantinoesque streetscapes around him. And he studied the way local kids revamped their noisily styled Japanese sport bikes, junking the fairings, the fiberglass, and the whizbang color schemes, stripping the bikes bare. This was grunge biking at its hippest, a perfect mirror of the music, clothes, and attitude of the early Nineties. Galluzzi distilled this Southern Californian aesthetic in his designs, and, in 1993, morphed it into a production motorcycle of race-proven technical brilliance--a bike that has not only inspired numerous other designs (such as the Triumph T509 and the Buell Lightning), but has reestablished Ducati as a competitive market force among bike producers. The M900 was nicknamed the Monster by Galluzzi himself. ("It was never the Italian version, Il Mostro, as some people think. I always called it a Monster.") This is a beast that can be tamed by riders of either gender, which helps account for its popularity (to date, more than 45,000 Monsters have been sold--an extraordinary figure for such a stylized bike). The rest can be put down to its unmistakable sexiness: sleek, fast, Italian. |
Keywords:
motorcycles, Starck, BMW, Ducati, Guggenheim