Art School and Engineering Lead Designer to Aerodynamic Wonder
Lowie Vermeersch is a famous Belgian car designer. In this two-part interview, we walk through his career, starting at the TU Delft in Holland all the way to running his own design studio–Granstudio–in Turin, the heart of the Italian car design Industry.
He has the unique skill to design pure, timeless and elegant cars without any form of machoism. At Pininfarina, he designed the legendary Ferrari 458, an extremely beautiful, legendary sports car. At his own design studio, they worked on a.o. cars like the Dallara Stradale and the Lightyear One solar-powered car.
Lowie likes to talk about aerodynamics: it’s an aspect that is often not highlighted when designers present their designs, even though it’s a very fundamental aspect for vehicle design as a whole. This links back to his studies at the TU Delft, the Dutch University famous for its expertise in aerodynamics. There, he studied material science and physics, which provided him with a holistic take on car design, which is still a part of him as a designer today.
Vermeersch comes from an artist family (sculptors, painters) and perhaps this has been part of the reason for his desire to have an independent position. He had been fascinated by the independent Italian car design studios and went on to do his internship and later work at Pininfarina.
A combination of hard work, some merit, some luck, being the right guy at the right moment, allowed him to do great things there. He became responsible for design for the entire studio. He later founded Gran Studio, where they are capable of working on anything that you can see with the naked eye. They have worked on cars like the Dallara Stradale and the Lightyear One solar car, a 0.20 cd prototype for a five-door hatchback electric sedan with a 450-mile range aided by five square meters of solar panels.
Vermeersch is next moving to other projects in the broader mobility scene.
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
