Architect, Italy
Gae Aulenti is one of Italy’s best-known architects and one of the leading female
architects in the world. She has made her reputation in a versatile career that has
combined architecture with designs for theater, furniture, museums, exhibitions,
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showrooms, gardens, and city-planning projects. In this way, she is very much a product
of Milan in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when many architects, such as Vittorio Gregotti,
combined architecture with design.
Aulenti graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic
University in 1954. From 1955 to 1965, she was an editor in charge of layout at Casabella
magazine in Milan, directed by Ernesto Rogers, her mentor. She was a member of a
group of disciples of Rogers that included Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi, both of
whom also were editors at Cas abella. Her career as an architect began with a series of designs for
showrooms: Olivetti (1967) in Paris; Olivetti (1968) in Buenos Aires; Knoll International
(1970) in New York; and Fiat (1970) in Brussels, Zurich, and Turin. She also designed
offices, such as Max Mara (1965) in Milan. She designed a traveling exhibition (1970)
for Olivetti and participated in the exhibition, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1972). In the 1960s, her interior designs are
kaleidoscopic explosions of forms into space, though later they become calm and
restrained, with curvilinear, surreal, and suggestive forms. The early showrooms are
experiments in the breaking up of space without interfering with its functional use.
During the 1980s, Aulenti’s attention turned toward the design of museums and
exhibition spaces. Her best-known project is the design of the Musée d’Orsay (1980–86)
in Paris, made in collaboration with a team of French architects and the lighting designer
Piero Castiglioni. This beautiful museum combines the iron structure and stucco
decoration of a railway station into a modern architectural composition. Aulenti also
worked on exhibition spaces for the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges
Pompidou Center in Paris (1982–85), the National Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona
(1987–95), and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1985–93). She designed “The Italian
Metamorphosis 1943–68” exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1994). The
museum and exhibition designs always take into account, according to Aulenti, how the
art is viewed by the visitor from different perspectives and combinations. Her exhibitions
develop contrasts between open and closed spaces as well as between the autonomy and
integration of spaces.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Aulenti designed a series of stage sets for theatrical
productions. These include sets for Rossini’s La Donna del Lago (1981–89), Rimski-Korsakov’s Zar Saltan at the
Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1988), Strauss’s Electra in Milan (1994), and Shakespeare’s King Lear at the
Teatro Argentina in Rome (1995). Aulenti’s stage sets contain beautiful dreamlike
imagery that juxtaposes color and evocative forms that transgress the rules of perspectival
construction. Aulenti sees the theater as a space of continuous transformation, where a
relation between time and space is enacted.
Museé d’Orsay, Paris, France, designed by Gae Aulenti (1986)
During the 1990s, Aulenti received several commissions for residences and public
buildings. The residences include a villa (1990) at Saint-Tropez, where four autonomous
cubic structures are arranged on a square plan and connected in various ways, opening
between interior and exterior. The public commissions include the entranceway to a train
station in Florence, a college in Biella, and the Italian Pavilion at Expo ‘92 in Seville. At
the Italian Pavilion, Aulenti emulates Mies van der Rohe in the aesthetic refinement and
use of materials. Aulenti’s architecture always combines the application of an aesthetic
order and the synthetic analysis of space. The designs take into account how space is
experienced and how spaces and masses are combined. She experiments with relations
among materials, distances, measurements, and equilibriums: primarily concerning how
the body is experienced in the space.
In Italy, Aulenti’s work has been the subject of important critical essays by Ernesto
Rogers, Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, and Francesco Dal Co. Although
she is Italy’s most famous woman architect, Aulenti’s work has had very little influence
on architectural practice in Italy and no theoretical influence in the architecture schools,
as opposed to her peers Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi.
