Gae Aulenti (1927-2012)

Michela Bonomo

Never Look Back

The building site of the Gare D’Orsay, with its brutalist concrete cores, metalwork studs and dim light, forms the background of this scene, otherwise showing two female figures fiercely walking ahead, careless of the objective of the camera. They are the architect Gae Aulenti and her beloved granddaughter, Nina. Aulenti is wearing a long black coat and a red site helmet, matching the all-red outfit of the little girl, holding onto her grandmother’s hand as if to find a sense of security in such an overwhelming space.

The refurbishment of the former Paris railway station into the Musée D’Orsay by Italian architect Gae Aulenti in the 1980s was one of the first examples of European reconversion of a disused industrial structure into a cultural space.1 With its collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art, this revolutionary project added one more cultural powerhouse to the city of Paris, representing a turning point in the career of Aulenti, who was 58 years old at the time.

Gae Aulenti and Nina Artioli on the building site of the Museè D’Orsay, Paris, 1984. Credits: Archivio Gae Aulenti.

Aulenti’s passion for architecture started at an early age. Her ambition to pursue a career, in opposition to the traditional role assigned to women in her family, led her to enrol at the Politecnico di Milano, from which she graduated in 1953.2 After a short-lived marriage, her daughter Giovanna was born, and more or less the same year, Aulenti set up her own architectural practice from home, working alone on a number of competitions and interior refurbishments.3

What laid the foundation of Aulenti’s later success were the first ten years of her professional career, spent working as a graphic designer for the architectural magazine Casabella-Continuità.4 Surrounded by influential intellectuals and visionary architects, Aulenti developed her professional agenda while becoming an active force in reimagining a new world for post-war Italy, one where tradition met technology in a harmonious balance. Aulenti believed that architecture is always a collective gesture, never an individual one, something which, therefore, should benefit the community as a whole; this belief is visible in all her projects, from everyday furniture to buildings.5

The success of the Musée D’Orsay led Aulenti to the political decision of mainly engaging in the construction of public cultural projects, making her agency tangible in many cities around the globe. Aulenti was ahead of her time in seeing the potential of transforming old industrial ruins into spaces for cultural exchange, where past and future could walk hand in hand towards a more inclusive society.

‘Architecture is a male profession, but I never took notice,’ she once said, crystallising in a few words her indifference towards sexism and her attitude as a professional.6 One of the first Italian woman architects to succeed at all scales of the project, she made the dream of becoming one possible for many, including Nina.

Image Credits 

  1. Archivio Gae Aulenti.

Sources

  1. Aulenti teamed up with the architect Italo Rota and the lighting architects Piero Castiglioni and Richard Pedruzzi, winning the competition for the Museè D’Orsay. The project started in 1980, and was completed in 1986. It is today one of the most visited museums in the world.
  2. Aulenti was one of two women graduating in a class of twenty men.
  3. Gae Aulenti set up her own studio in 1955, the same year she gave birth to her only daughter after separating from her husband, Francesco Buzzi. The architect’s first built work was a private house with adjacent stables in San Siro (Milan), commissioned by the Cumani family and completed in 1956.
  4. The editorial board of Casabella-Continuità was led by Ernesto Nathan Rogers between 1955 and 1965. Alongside working at the magazine, Gae Aulenti became a teaching assistant at the Politecnico di Milano for Ernesto Nathan Rogers, and at IUAV for Giuseppe Samonà.
  5. Furniture design was a common entry point for female architects to break into the profession. Among Aulenti’s most famous furniture design projects are the Locus Solus for Poltronova (1964), the Pipistrello table lamp for Matrinelli Luce (1965), the Jumbo marble table for Knoll (1965), and the Oracolo and Mezzo Oracolo for Artemide (1968). Appropriating the motto revived by Ernesto Nathan Rogers that a ‘good architect should be able to design from the spoon to the city,’ Aulenti’s office realised more than 200 buildings, the most famous of which include the Olivetti Store in Paris (1966), the Fiat Showroom in Genoa (1968), an installation at the National Modern Art Museum at Centre Pompidou in Paris (1985), renovation of Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1986), the Italian Pavilion at Expo in Seville (1992), a plan for the Italian Cultural institute in Tokyo (1998), renovation of Scuderie Papali in Rome (2000), and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (2003).
  6. Some have considered Aulenti a feminist with extreme views. She believed that discussing the gender of an architect within the profession would reinforce the binary status quo, which identified women as experts in interior decoration and furniture, and put men more in charge of the actual architecture of the building, thus undermining the role of women in the profession.