Design and safety, Pininfarina Nido at the MoMa in New York

The Pininfarina concept car showed in an unusual exhibition of 300 contemporary products, designed to help us feeling safer
Turin, September 10, 2005. Like the Cisitalia, also Pininfarina Nido becomes part of the temple of the Modern Art in New York. From October 16 2005 to January 2 2006 the safety research prototype realized by Pininfarina will be among the protagonists of SAFE: Design Takes on Risk, the first major design exhibition at MoMA since its reopening in 2004.
SAFE redefines the design’s aim showing its potentialities to face problems of the XXI century. The exhibition presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, to respond to emergencies, to provide a sense of comfort and security.
The combination of design and safety, in a convergence among aesthetics, functionality and technology, is well represented in Nido, presented in a world preview during the Paris Motor Show in 2004, winning the Most Beautiful Car of the Year award in the Prototype and Concept Car category. The Nido project is based on the development and prototyping of new solutions involving both the structure and the design of a small two-seater car with the objective of increasing levels of internal safety, involving directly the passengers transported, and the external one, designed to limit the damages to pedestrians in case of collision.
Nido is not the first Pininfarina’s creation to be showed in the famed New Yorker museum: in fact, in 1947, the Cisitalia 202 SC, designed by the Founder Battista “Pinin” Farina, was the first car in the world permanently displayed in the MoMA as “one of the eight wonders of our time”.

( Rear Wheel Drive, Rear engine transverse mounted like the smart)