Last week, we reported extensively on Lamborghini celebrating 20 years of Centro Stile, the Italian marque’s in-house styling division. We were also among the first outlets to break the story about the stunning Lamborghini Manifesto concept, a design study unveiled over the weekend at the Centro Stile celebrations inside the Lamborghini Museum in Sant’Agata Bolognese.
The event was led by current Lamborghini design chief Mitja Borkert and attended by several of Lamborghini’s most influential figures and the wider VW Group, including the great Walter de Silva, who was instrumental in shaping the brand’s visual identity during the Audi-era transformation.
Now, Lamborghini has gone deeper into how its design DNA has evolved and where it’s headed next. Having relied upon external design houses since the 1960s, Centro Stile was where Lamborghini’s modern identity was built from the ground up. Founded in the early 2000s and fully operational by 2005, it’s built into the engineering and production process itself, ensuring that every line, curve, and crease on a Lamborghini is both emotionally charged and technically feasible.
“A modern super sports car company cannot rely on external studios alone. Design is the number one reason people buy a Lamborghini,” says Borkert, who has led the division since 2016. Cars like Countach and Diablo, a model celebrating 35 years in 2025, with their iconic wedge silhouette, designed by the great Marcello Gandini, have been poster cars for enthusiasts for decades. That same philosophy has guided every modern model from the Murciélago and Gallardo to the Revuelto and the new Temerario.
Inside Centro Stile, 25 designers from across the world bring Lamborghini’s visual language to life. They range from young digital modelers to veterans in their fifties who have seen the evolution from clay to Computer Aided Design (CAD).
Together, this diverse and multicultural team combines Italian style with global perspectives, Germans, Japanese, Americans, Poles, and so many more, working together on everything from aerodynamics to color, trim, and ergonomics. They ensure that the brand’s signature design elements, like the Y-shaped motifs and hexagonal elements, which link to 1960s Italian industrial design, continue to resonate in current and future models.
Borkert calls the design studio a “football team,” where everyone has a role and a shared goal: remain instantly recognizable, but never predictable. His philosophy centers on three pillars: curiosity, recognizability, and surprise. Curiosity keeps the team forward-looking, recognizability maintains continuity, and surprise ensures each new Lamborghini exceeds expectations.
To further nurture that spirit, Borkert created a “crazy corner,” a small group tasked with imagining what the brand could look like 20 years from now. Artificial intelligence now assists with visualization, but creative judgment stays human. Borkert adds that Technology is a tool, but the final decision will always be theirs.
This brings us to the aforementioned Manifesto concept, a sculpture on four wheels that brings Centro Stile’s efforts and essence into form. Like the Terzo Millennio concept before it, which carried design elements of the Revuelto and the Temerario, the Manifesto serves as a platform, previewing the design cues of future models.
Images: Automobili Lamborghini
