Carlo Mollino (right) did a little bit of everything amazingly well. He was a brilliant designer, engineer, architect, and photographer who was always just enough "outside" the fields he dabbled in to really turn things on their heads. In fact the catalogue of the Mollino show at Turin likens him to that extravagant, hungry genius, Ettore Bugatti.

After creating the Bisiluro and witnessing its demise at Le Mans in 1955, Mollino only dreamed of going even faster, drawing up designs for a car (left) intended to shatter land speed records. Putting everything into the need to keep the car on the ground, he created what is essentially an upside down airplane wing--its driver lying on his back, like a luge rider--with only a tiny windscreen to peek through. The real gift of the current Mollino show in Turin is a life-size model of the car he never got to produce, lovingly crafted by 87-year-old Milanese coach-building company Carrozzeria Stola.

From there Mollino moved on to aeronautics, developing planes and his own air-show stunts inspired, Leonardo-like, by his studies of nature. "The essence of Mollino's aerobatics," writes Fulvio Ferrari in an essay from the beautiful Mondalori Electa book, Arabesques (2006), from which these images are borrowed, "lies in the imitation of [the perfect manoevres]" of the falcon or the swallow "with their darting flight and their weaving and unexpected turns." (Right: A detailed, hand-written plan for a series of Mollino's swooping, swerving airplane stunts.)

The dirty photos (see Part I) came later--and he kept right on shooting them into the 1970s.

(Thanks to designboom, where we found out about the Turin show.)

-- OWEN PHILLIPS