Happy 70th birthday, Walter de Silva! Recalling his legacy with 10 masterpieces

Walter de Silva, iconic car designer and VW Group’s retired design director, turned 70 this year. Throughout his career spanning over five decades, he created breakthrough designs for several brands, also paying homage to their glorious past yet providing new momentum to their design language. He is one of those all-time greatest who left a mark on the legacy of automotive history, and clearly left a massive hole in the World’s largest car manufacturer’s creative section that nobody could fill since then.

As for Mr de Silva, let’s take a quick look at his impressive CV! Walter Maria de Silva was born on 27 February 1951 in Lecco, in the industrialised North of Italy. He began his career in Turin at Fiat’s Centro Stile at the young age of 21. After a few years, he moved from Fiat’s Centro Stile Fiat to the I.DE.A. Institute in 1977.

In 1986, he left I.DE.A. to take the lead of Alfa Romeo’s famous Centro Stile and accomplished the rebirth of Alfa’s design language, paying homage to the glorious past with models like the 145/146 the 147 and the 156.

In 1999 after decades of success, he moved to another Latin brand with a Fiat history. By that time, the SEAT Marque belonged to the VW Group. Ferdinand Piëch personally asked for Walter de Silva to revolutionise SEAT design to match its new marketing slogan auto emoción. Honestly, I did not particularly like his period at Seat, with a few awkward designs, like the way-too revisionary Toledo or putting Alfa tail lights on the Cordoba. Still, his tenure at Seat also brought several design awards for the Spanish brand.

In 2002 Mr de Silva was promoted as Head of Design of the Audi group. It was more than just Audi, as at that time, as the group, as the conglomerate’s subdivision encompassed the Audi, SEAT and Lamborghini brands.

From this period, he was credited with introducing the full-height, single-frame front grille that became a distinctive feature of every Audi model since then.

These years spawned several of my personal favourite De Silva designs, and some of them will also be featured in this article. This period was the golden age of innovation for these brands, with both production cars and concepts. Apparently, I was not the only one to appreciate the work of Mr De Silva, and in 2007, the new CEO, Martin Winterkorn appointed him as Head of Volkswagen Group Design. His role was to lay out the World’s largest car manufacturer’s passenger car brand’s overall strategic design direction. His legacy went beyond brilliant designs, and he managed an unrivalled wealth of talents that followed him from Italy, like Wolfgang Egger, Filippo Perini and the entire Italdesign studio.

From there on, he was in charge of all VW passenger car brands encompassing Škoda, SEAT, Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti. His tenure coincided with the golden era of the group, and Mr Silva left while he was winning. His departure in 2015 came at difficult times. Looking at new models copying the predecessors, I feel the group never really recovered.

The English Wikipedia page states that he retired from the big league, allegedly to design ladies’ shoes. Nevertheless, the Italian Wiki page noted that in 2017 Mr de Silva was hired by the Chinese BAIC Group to create the design language of ArcFox, their electric mobility brand.

Below are a few models and concepts that will remain a lasting and worthy legacy of the Maestro. I suspect some of them might bear the traces of other designers or even attributed to his protégées (e.g. Wolfgang Egger at Audi). To get to the next car in the list, click to the article below, or scroll down to the next article.