Miguel Galluzzi

Miguel Galluzzi (born October 26, 1959) is an industrial designer specializing in motorcycle design. Galluzzi currently heads Piaggio's Advanced Design Center (PADC) in Pasadena, California,

Widely known for having designed the Ducati Monster, Galluzzi has also designed the Aprilia Dorsoduro, RSV4, and Tuono — as well as the Moto Guzzi V7 Racer and California 1400.

Under Galluzzi's direction, Moto Guzzi received the Motorcycle Design Association Award in 2012, and in 2013, Visor Down named Galuzzi one of its Top Ten motorcycle designers.

Background Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and raised in the US, Galluzzi is a third generation motorcyclist. a 1959 Kreidler 50cc.

Galluzzi would later study at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, graduating in 1986 from the same Transportation Design program as BMW's noted designer, David Robb. Galluzzi first worked for Opel, and then for Honda's V-Car/Omega design studio in 1988, first in Offenbach, Germany and later in Milan.

Design career In 1989 Galluzzi began designing for Cagiva, then Ducati's parent company, in Varese, Italy. eventually become Vice President of Design for Piaggio, Aprilia's parent company.

Because Galluzzi is tall, many of his creations — which feature low seat heights and high foot pegs (e.g., the Monster) — are better suited to their target buyer than their designer.

Monster

Under direction of Ducati's technical engineer, Massimo Bordi, Galluzzi created a design widely noted for its rigorous minimalism, In ranking the Monster as 9th on his list of the 10 best motorcycle designs of all time, noted motorcycle designer, Glynn Kerr, described the design as having "all it needs and no more."

For its 1998 exhibition, The Art of the Motorcycle, the New York Guggenheim Museum featured 114 motorcycles, including the Monster. In the exhibition catalog, the museum said: "flying in the face of every contemporary motorcycle design rubric from Tokyo to Munich, Galluzzi recreated stripped-bare suburban specials in a production motorcycle. The result, a brilliant piece of pop-culture interpretation, was the M900, nicknamed "the Monster."

Numerous sources credit the Monster the bike "became the company's best selling and most profitable model line," essential to the company's success.

Later motorcycles After the Monster, Galluzzi designed the 1997 Ducati ST2, which Industrial designer Andrew Serbinski considered ill-proportioned in its first generation, with its large fuel tank."

Galluzzi subsequently designed the Cagiva Planet of 1998, a variant of the Mito, which used a Suzuki engine shared by the TL1000.

After leaving Cagiva and joining Aprilia in 2006, Galluzzi designed the 2007 Aprilia Dorsoduro, 2008 RSV4, 2008 Mana, SL 750 Shiver of 2009, and several Husqvarna models.

Many of the Ducatis Galluzzi originally styled were later revised and updated by Pierre Terblanche, including the ST series and the Monster 696 update of 2008. Terblanche later joined Galluzzi at Aprilia, where they have worked together on several new and revised models for Aprilia subsidiary Moto Guzzi. The two collaborated on the Moto Guzzi V12 series, with Le Mans, Strada, and X variants, displayed at EICMA in 2009. Galluzzi described the challenge he and Terblanche faced revising the Moto Guzzi image by saying, "The Guzzi crowd is extremely conservative, but if we only concentrate on those, we are going to lose eventually. So these bikes are looking into the future." This is similar to the balance sought with earlier Ducati designs, but, "the advantage Guzzi has versus Ducati is that Ducati makes sportsbikes, Guzzi can do anything it wants because they've been doing it a long time and on all sorts of bikes."

In 2012 Moto Guzzi introduced Galuzzi's "Art Nouveau style" California 1400 which breaks with traditional Harley-Davidsion-inspired cruiser style of the previous California. The new 1400 is more radically modern, similar to the latest power cruisers, the Harley-Davidsion V-Rod and Ducati Diavel.