Editor: gestalten 
Features: Full color, hardcover, stitch bound, 304 pages
Format: 22.5 × 29 cm | 9 × 11 ½ inches 
Price: €50 (D) | £ 45 | $ 70 (US) 
ISBN: 978-3-96704-033-3

EU + UK PUBLICATION DATE: October 19, 2021 
INT PUBLICATION DATE: November 30, 2021

ABOUT THE BOOK
A Renaissance man with an eye for detail and foresight for innovation, Peter Schreyer is one of the most influential car designers of our time. Roots and Wings explores how a boy from a small town in Bavaria went on to become lead designer at Audi, Volkswagen, Kia and Hyundai. Looking at his formative moments and pivotal creative discoveries, this book is the story of a man, who, guided by his artistic sensibility and with his sketchbook always at hand, made his mark on automobile history and the future of mobility to come.
While some car designers are self-confessed petrol-heads, whose interest is focused on cars, and cars alone, Peter Schreyer is on the opposite side of the spectrum: he gains as much inspiration from art in all its different forms as he does from his peers in the automobile industry. One could argue, like Schreyer’s long-time mentor Hartmut Warkfuß did, that he is “an artist who uses these skills to do automobile design.” From an early age onwards, artistic movements such as the Dadaists, the large-scale paintings of Cy Twombly that convey a sense of freedom and spontaneity, sculptors like Jean Tinguely and Alexander Calder, whose mobiles literally set art in motion and embrace the element of chance, and designers such as, Charles and Ray Eames, Luigi Collani and Thomas Heatherwick—a fellow alumnus of the Royal College of Art in London—have influenced both his own art and designs over the last 40 years. But inspiration has also come from unexpected sources such as Miles Davis and Frank Zappa: Like the nonconformist rockstar, Schreyer has a history of including elements of surrealism, humor, and experimentation in his work that exist in the background. It’s always there, feeding his imagination and expressing itself through the bold designs and an embrace of iconoclastic statements that he continues to surprise with.  
But even if spontaneity has always played a key role in Peter Schreyers design practice, there was no way he could have predicted what was going to happen when, 15 years ago, a phone call was about to instigate radical change. In 2006 Schreyer was in an enviable position: he had earned a reputation as an accomplished car designer, with an impressive list of successful designs to his name, including the Audi TT, the visionary A2, and the iconic Volkswagen New Beetle, but when he answered the call from Kia, out of the blue, “it clicked in my head that this was going to be interesting. I was immediately intrigued, and from then on, it was hard to think about anything else.”  The decision to move from Germany to Korea was a life-altering experience for Peter Schreyer, motivated by his intrinsic desire to take on a fresh challenge that allowed great creative freedom. Blurring the lines between East and West, Schreyer bridges his homeland’s heritage of automotive design with the keen opportunities that South Korea’s immense transformation and the cultural phenomenon known as Hallyu—“the Korean wave” that extends far wider than the automotive industry presents. The term given to the profusion of Korean cultural exports, such as K-Pop and Oscar-winning films, that have taken the world by storm in recent years is the basis for the stratospheric growth both in economic terms and in the country’s soft power in just a few decades. Schreyers designs prove that combining the two vastly different design cultures can result in something unique that is greater than the sum of their parts, and consequently captures the attention of the wider world.
Exploring the conceptualization of 15 of Peter Schreyer’s most impactful designs, like the Kia Kee Concept that introduced the now famous Tiger Nose grille—the instantly recognisable face of the brand—the Kia POP Concept, a statement about the design possibilities of electric vehicles, or the Genesis New York Concept that was ground-breaking for the development of the “athletic elegance” aesthetic of Hyundai’s premium brand,  Roots and Wings is the first comprehensive study of Schreyer’s overarching vision and design philosophy. After 40 years at the sharp end of the automotive industry, the designer has formulated a concise list of five principles that function, on one level, as a dose of idiosyncratic guidance for up and coming designers, but can equally be read as the foundation of his distinctive way of working. 
By opening his sketchbooks and giving intimate insights into both the principles at the core of his design philosophy and his unique approach to creative leadership, this book is essentially a studio visit in one of design’s most dynamic disciplines: For those working at the cutting- edge of mobility, the question is always “What’s next?”. From Peter Schreyer’s viewpoint, the response might well be: “More than you realize, and sooner than you expect.”

A FORTY YEAR CAREER
Born in 1953 in Bad Reichenhall, Peter Schreyer grew up on his parents’ farm, developing a passion for flying and skeleton bob racing. From 1975-1979 he studied industrial design at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich and began to work with Audi first as a student in 1978, subsequently winning the Audi Scholarship to study transportation design at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1980, Schreyer began working with Audi in exterior, interior and conceptual design, before moving to the Volkswagen group's prestigious design studio in California in 1991. After becoming VW’s head of exterior design in 1993, he decided to return to Ingolstadt, shaping Audi’s design strategy as the Director of Design between 1994-2002. Having been part of the Volkswagen group for more than 25 years, Schreyer left his position as Head of Design of the VW group to become Chief Design Officer for Kia Motors in 2006. In 2013, seven years after his arrival in Korea, Schreyer stepped up from his role at Kia to become President of all Kia and Hyundai design centers worldwide and is now, as president and Chief of Design of the Hyundai Motor Group, responsible for the company’s long-term design vision.
Schreyer has received numerous awards and prizes throughout his career, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in recognition of his contributions to automotive design, the “Design Team of the Year” award in 1999 for Audi as well as the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2002.

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