The exhibition, open until January 12, 2025, traces, in a concise but surprising way, the human and professional history of Aulenti, with a look also at the interaction of architecture with the other arts, as well as the interaction between culture and politics. It is not simply a selection, large or small, of drawings and designs, prototypes and sketches, models and photographs, to be displayed on walls or in display cases, although these are also there.
This is the first retrospective dedicated to Gae Aulenti (1927 – 2012), one of the most representative professionals of contemporary architecture and design. In her more than 60-year career, the talented designer worked in diverse fields: from urban-scale design to exhibition design, landscape architecture, interior decoration, furniture design, graphics and scenography. . The exhibition presents her career in an analytical and surprising way to convey her personal way of seeing, imagining and designing reality, which left its mark in various Italian and foreign contexts in the second half of the 20th century. The itinerary is made up of a sequence of rooms reproduced at a 1:1 scale, with the help of original materials (drawings, photographs, models) from the architect’s Milanese archive.
The occasion is intended to be a comprehensive reassessment through life-size reconstructions of parts of Gae Aulenti’s works. The Milan Triennale is the institution that, more than any other institution, accompanied Gae Aulenti on his long journey of expressive adventures: it was there where he began his career, in the early fifties; and it was there where on October 16, 2012 he received the Gold Medal alla Carriera (Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement) for his contribution to Italian architecture.
Gae Aulenti in the works of the Gare d’Orsay, 1980, unidentified author.
The exhibition takes a two-pronged approach to documenting Aulenti’s work. The first consists of a series of 1:1 scale reproductions of several of her most influential architectural and interior projects. Visitors enter the exhibition passing a recreation of her ‘Arrival at the Seaside’ installation for the 13th Triennale in 1964, a series of sketches of women dressed in robes blown up to life size and placed on a reflective background beneath a textile roof. curly.
Moving further into the gallery, visitors are taken to the Olivetti showroom in Buenos Aires, which Aulenti designed in 1968. Here, a set of risers act as a display of Olivetti products, many of which were designed by Aulenti, including his ‘King Lamp Sun’, made for Kartell in 1967, as well as typewriters by artists such as Ettore Sottsass and Marcello Nizzoli.
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