A peek inside Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo's Detroit studio

Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo is a man in high demand. Join us for a visit to his Detroit studio and an insider's look into the life and mind of this talented artist.

By Alex Kierstein 2013 / Photos by Alex Kierstein

This is Camilo Pardo's studio. It's a bit messy, he says. He just had a show in the space.

An artist this busy gets a pass. Pardo works, a lot. The studio was full of commissioned pieces in various states of completion as well as a huge calendar-like reminder of all the to-be-started commissions he needs to crank out in the next few weeks.

If the name sounds familiar, it's because Pardo was the design guy behind the Ford GT that became the domestic-bedroom-poster answer to the F40s and Diablos of the decade preceding it. Pardo directed a team of designers and engineers to bang out the GT on a shoestring. The result was a convoluted development process—or at least, it would have been had Pardo not directed resources shrewdly and used his engineers to hack the normal sketch-to-production process.

But that's beside the point. Pardo is first and foremost an artist in demand, and his building (there's a ballroom upstairs) in downtown Detroit is full of the kind of things that he likes to work with. There's an OG Fiat 500 in a corner with half a chromed mannequin next to it. GTs pose on canvasses with World War II planes. Picturesque painting tables litter the room.

Take a quick spin through Pardo's workspace.