Gabriel Ø: the steampunk sidecar on Trike Magazine!

One of the most beloved artworks to date, this Steampunk trike has been featured in several magazines such as Autoevolution and Trike Magazine.

The inception of Project Gabriel Ø dates back to February 2010 when Lorenzo had a nightmare. The protagonist of his eerie dream was a curious motorcycle, which Lorenzo decided to sketch just for amusement. These original drawings laid the foundation for the development of the future Gabriel project. Upon seeing the sketches, Lorenzo’s friend and colleague, Marco, encouraged him to utilize computer graphics and transform them into 3D images.

Lorenzo then embarked on creating a complex 3D model, while Marco contributed to enhancing the passenger section. Eventually, both of them focused on shading, illumination, and rendering the images.

The design of the motorcycle is deeply influenced by the steampunk culture, an artistic movement encompassing literature, fashion, cinema, music, and product design. Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction, merges modern technology with Victorian atmospheres in a fantasy world filled with anachronistic mechanical creations.

Therefore, the functionality of this sidecar is anything but conventional. The mathematical symbol Ø (zero or empty set) was added to the name to emphasize the impossibility of reproducing a similar vehicle in real life.

The name Gabriel evokes the well-known archangel, who served as inspiration for several design elements such as the silver head at the front, the prominent horn reminiscent of a celestial trumpet, the tailpipes shaped like angelic feathers, and the front grid featuring two arms holding the headlight, as if it were the biblical flaming sword.

Another interesting feature is the large wheel on the passenger module (sidecar), loosely inspired by the early 20th-century monowheel models, such as the one designed by M. Goventosa, an Italian inventor who presented his prototype in Paris in the Thirties.

The Gabriel Ø not only appears in the 3D images created by Lorenzo and Marco (including the one where the designers are pictured alongside their creation) but also on the cover of AstroNero’s EP.

In 2016, Trike Magazine released an article about the project. The following year, Lorenzo and Marco developed a video featuring the motorbike.

Articles available to read on:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/a-steampunk-sidecar-bike-please-77745.html