The king of Polish car designers, Janusz Kaniewski, who suddenly passed away on 9 May 2015 aged 41, has made a strong name for Polish car designers. The passing of one of the first graduates in Transportation Design from the famous Istituto Europeo di Design in Turin, the most famous school of auto design, sent a shock throughout the entire moto industry. Surprised by the designer’s sudden death, his employees are receiving condolences from the bosses of the largest car manufacturers. For Mr Kaniewski was not only an acclaimed author of the Ferrari California and Ferrari 458, but also had other creations attributed to him: the Lancia Delta, the futuristic Honda CIVIC, the Alfa Romeo Mi.To, the Alfa Romeo Giuglietta, and the Suzuki Kirashi (the designer would not confirm this, most probably because of confidentiality clauses with the automakers). He was also a well-known philanthropist and an extraordinary man.

Mr Kaniewski’s Milan alma mater attracts most would-be designers from Poland. Many of them are graduates from the Design Department at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw, which has a Studio of Means of Transport Design. “They must think highly of us in Milan, because our graduates get admitted not only to the Istituto Europeo di Design but also the city’s university of technology, the Scuola Politecnica di Milano,” Professor Piotr Jędrzejewski, head of the Studio of Means of Transport Design at the Wroclaw Academy, tells Polska.pl. “One of our youngest graduates, Mateusz Wowk, a BA in Motor Transport Design, went on to study at the Milan university of technology, and after an internship at the Lamborghini plant in Santa Agata, landed a job there,” adds Professor Jędrzejewski. Another Scuola Politecnica di Milano graduate is Jacek Pepłowski, who now works for BMW Mini, and Bogusław Paruch, employed by Ford.

Professor Jędrzejewski spent almost a decade at the Studio of Means of Transport Design, which had been founded by Professor Wilhelm Semaniszyn. He thinks the studio’s edge is its comprehensive curriculum. “We want our future designers to have no areas hidden from them, no black boxes that only an engineer could grasp. We want our graduates to be able to cope with the whole picture,” explains Professor Jędrzejewski.

He himself used to design mining equipment and bomb squad military vehicles at the studio that once cooperated with the Starachowice Car Plant and the lorry plant in Jelcz. The studio’s track record includes a partnership with Kross, Poland’s biggest bicycle manufacturer.

According to the Professor, the three to five students who each year enrol in the studio are utterly preoccupied with car design and fascinated by the subject. Apart from the mandatory curriculum they will register for competitions and come up with their own extra activities. “To succeed in this field you need to give it your all,” he thinks.

Another studio graduate, Jacek Pepłowski, currently working at the Munich-based Mini plant, started designing cars when he was a student of a secondary art school in Wroclaw. He gave vent to his passion by studying at the Wroclaw Academy of Art and Design and training at Volkswagen. Having won an MA in industrial design, he enrolled in a crash course in Car Design at the Scuola Politecnica di Design. He came to grips with the Italian style there and established contacts in the car-making world, among others with Honda, for which he worked after university.