The Drawing Room: Pininfarina and the Wedge That Required the Pop-Up

Pininfarina was founded on 22 May 1930 in Turin, when Battista "Pinin" Farina and his brother Giovanni opened Carrozzeria Pinin Farina, having already been operating informally since 1928. "Pinin" is Piedmontese for "the little one", a nickname tied to Battista's short stature that stuck to both the man and the company for three decades, until the Italian President formally authorised the legal name change to Pininfarina in 1961, the same year Battista handed leadership to his son Sergio. The house's clearest claim to historical weight is a single object: the 1946 Cisitalia 202. It appeared in New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1951, in a landmark exhibition called "Eight Automobiles", where curator Arthur Drexler called it "rolling sculpture" alongside a 1930 Mercedes SS and a 1937 Cord 812. In 1972, the Cisitalia entered MoMA's permanent collection, the first car ever to do so. That single act of institutional recognition, a car treated as fine art rather than only an industrial product, explains more about Pininfarina's standing than any sales figure could. By the 1970s, Pininfarina was responsible for nearly every Ferrari road car, a relationship that had begun two decades earlier and would run, with one real exception, until 2012. Leonardo Fioravanti's 1975 Ferrari 308 GTB, unveiled at the Paris Motor Show, replaced Ferrari's softer curves with a low, cab-forward wedge, and that shape required a different kind of headlight: one that could fold flat into the nose at rest and rise only when needed. That single styling decision is the reason this archive's own Pop-Up Headlights badge exists at all, and the Ferrari F40 that carries it traces its own design lineage back to exactly this moment. The one real exception is worth stating plainly rather than letting the broader claim stand unqualified: the 1973 Dino 308 GT4 was styled by rival house Bertone, not Pininfarina. And the relationship's true end came in 2013, not with a falling out but with a structural shift: Ferrari's own in-house Centro Stile, under Flavio Manzoni, designed the LaFerrari and every Ferrari flagship since, the first time in six decades the marque's halo car did not carry Pininfarina's name. Pininfarina itself survived that ending. It stopped manufacturing cars in 2011, and since 2015 has operated as a design and engineering consultancy majority-owned by India's Mahindra Group. What it decided, for nearly a century, was not how a car should be decorated. It was what a car was allowed to look like at all.