Gae Aulenti (1927-2012) was an Italian architect and a prolific designer of furniture, lighting and theatre sets. Aulenti was one of the few women working in architecture and design in postwar Italy and her talents found a vast range of outlets, from showrooms for Fiat and Olivetti to sets for La Scala, the opera house in Milan, to private villas for the rich. But it is for her work in museums and exhibition design that she was best known - and for her largest project, which also proved to be her most divisive.
She was chosen in 1981 to convert the Beaux Arts-style Gare d'Orsay railway station in Paris into a new home for impressionist art. Her proposal transformed the cavernous central hall, a magnificent barrel-vaulted train shed lit by arching roof lights, into an open exhibition space, with the insertion of modern industrial materials. Original cast-iron beams and plaster rosettes were contrasted with wire mesh partitions and new rough stone walls, on which the collection, of mainly French art from 1848 to 1915, was daringly hung.
Throughout the 60s and 70s, Aulenti produced furniture for Milan's major design houses.
The houses she went on to design in the 70s and 80s shared a similarly postmodern sensibility. With echoes of buttresses and primal pitched-roof forms, they reveal a taste for references to pre-classical architecture and a sense of elementary construction. In many ways they are a strong reflection of her character, described by the Italian writer Alberto Arbasino as "a cross between bucolic charm and the solid mentality of an engineer".
Aulenti enjoyed what she called the "double ambiguity" of working in existing contexts, juxtaposing elements of the past with the present. As well as the Musée d'Orsay and the Palazzo Grassi, she designed the permanent collection galleries of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Palacio Nacional in Barcelona and, most recently, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
FontanaArte
In 1881, Luigi Fontana starts his business in Milan, manufacturing float glass for the construction industry. As the century draws to a close, the company is producing refined bespoke and one-off glass furnishing accessories.
In 1931 the architect, designer and founding editor of Domus magazine, Gio Ponti is invited to take over the company’s art direction. Several of the pieces he designs for FontanaArte are still in production, including the 0024 Suspension, Bilia, Pirellina, and Pirellone lamps, and the Tavolino 1932 coffee table.
In the mid-thirties, Gio Ponti decides it’s time to give a boost to Luigi Fontana’s line of prestigious furnishing accessories and invites Pietro Chiesa to join him in the art direction.
Chiesa is a distinguished master glazier who enlists the craftsmen from his own workshop to join him.
As the years roll by, Pietro Chiesa plays a key role in the company as his creative verve offers ample proof that he is a versatile master of vast cultural and technical expertise. He designs over a thousand different pieces, some of which make design history and which remain in production today, including the 1932 curved-glass Fontana table, the Cartoccio vase (1932), and the Luminator floor lamp (1933).
In the mid-Fifties French master glazier and decorator Max Ingrand, renowned for his stunning stained-glass church windows, is invited to the art direction team. He takes the company towards more intensely industrial production but always keeping the craftsmen in his sights.
In the seventies, Architect Gae Aulenti, who had already worked with the company in the past, becomes another leading light in the corporate renewal process.
Her first move was to makeover the collection, personally designing lamps and furnishing accessories that are still in the catalogue. At the same time she recruited a team of young contributors, validating the corporate mission to scout talent and acknowledging the importance of various strategic communication levers.
FontanaArte’s legendary success is forever linked to Ponti, Chiesa, Ingrand and Aulenti, but also to its reliance on prestigious partnerships, initiating in winning alliances with internationally renowned architects or emerging young talents who all have contributed to what is a phantasmagorical collection in many ways: lighting with personality inspired by established styling.
Wall lamp
Nickel-plated brass base, diffuser in amber or white opaline blown glass
Options
White
Amber
SPECIFICATIONS
Width 20cm, depth 23cm, height 30cm
Made in Italy
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