Italian architect and designer Angelo Mangiarotti is at present the main focus of a significant retrospective on the Triennale di Milano museum. Right here the exhibition’s curator Fulvio Irace picks seven key works from the present.
Angelo Mangiarotti: When Buildings Take Form goals to be probably the most full retrospective ever dedicated to the architect and designer, who died in 2012.
Curated by Irace in collaboration with the Fondazione Angelo Mangiarotti, the exhibition in Milan units out to show the breadth of his work, with large-scale footage of his buildings on show alongside quite a few objects of furnishings and homeware.
“The exhibition is the primary alternative we’ve needed to reveal the nice grasp’s really complicated nature,” mentioned Irace.
“This has lengthy been ignored in favour of his status as a builder, who centered on the processes of fabric tradition and on the strategies of prefabrication,” he continued.
“Whereas it’s true that Mangiarotti reinvented the everlasting archetype of the submit and lintel so to talk, utilizing it all through his profession in an astonishing vary of variations, it’s equally true that – because the exhibition factors out – his work incorporates a inventive vein of nice plastic and sculptural energy, which locations it within the area of artwork in addition to in that of structure and design.”
The exhibition was designed by Milan-based Ottavio di Blasi & Companions and contains quite a few objects displayed on reflective circumstances designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. Piano labored with Mangiarotti early in his profession and was interviewed by Irace as a part of the exhibition.
Together with quite a few industrial buildings and railway stations, Mangiarotti was greatest recognized for designing the easy Mater Misericordiae Church in Baranzate on the outskirts of Milan and the Three-Cylinder Home within the metropolis’s San Siro district.
His expressive designs for the house embody numerous armchairs, tables and modular furnishings, in addition to clocks, lamps, vases and even an ashtray and a conveyable tv.
Learn on for Irace’s picks of Mangiarotti’s most intriguing items:
The Mater Misericordiae Church, Baranzate, Milan (1957)
“A primary work that was additionally a masterwork – within the years when Visconti was filming Rocco and His Brothers on the outskirts of Milan, Mangiarotti imagined a church of sunshine, a beacon within the fog of the metropolis.
“The construction’s 4 cement columns, erected on a base with a small variety of steps, echoed Mies van der Rohe’s design for the Bacardi workplace constructing, making a Christian temple whose trademark is its structural simplicity. The pillars help a posh array of prefabricated cantilevered beams, creating a fragile coffered sample on the inside.
“The church is laid out as a liturgical procession whose impression is theatrical, as those that enter first descend into the crypt earlier than rising from the darkness by taking a stairway as much as the extent of the church, the place the sunshine unexpectedly shines upon them. A double-glass membrane surrounds the outside, creating the impression from afar of a lantern or a glowing crystal.”
The Three-Cylinder Home, Milan (1959)
“One of many first residence buildings inbuilt post-war Milan, this 1959 venture marked Mangiarotti’s return from his interval in America, the place he had made the acquaintance of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.
“Mangiarotti was aiming for a prototype dwelling that might introduce the upper-middle class of the brand new Italian Republic to American modernity. Picturing a brand new, extra casual way of life free of conference, he experimented with an residence block whose three cylinders intersect at their stairwell.
“With the cylinders raised from the bottom by the massive central pillar that helps the ground slabs, the structure of the flats was left freed from any encumbrances. Extra progressive nonetheless was the cylinders’ exterior going through, consisting of an uninterrupted casing as a substitute of conventional cladding.
“However in contrast to the curtain partitions of the Worldwide Type, the floor was not made solely of glass however fairly a posh system of parts that included wooden, affording the flexibleness to custom-design every residence. Commercials within the newspapers of the time referred to the flats as ‘houses of the long run for the married {couples} of at this time’.”
Giogali lighting (1967)
“One exhibit is a double curtain based mostly on a system of modular glass hooks, which revolutionised the idea of the chandelier [as pioneered in Mangiarotti’s Giogali lighting range for Vistosi].
“The hooks are produced by hand from strips of glass, reduce and stretched whereas sizzling, which might be freely mixed with each other with out the necessity for any metallic help construction, making doable countless variations in a course of not dissimilar to automated meeting. In the end, this modular strategy presents a chance for full inventive freedom.”
Snaidero workplaces, showroom and repair amenities, Majano del Friuli (1977)
“To equip the Snaidero kitchen-component manufacturing facility with an workplace constructing, showroom and worker amenities, Mangiarotti partially revamped a design used years earlier for the Armitalia plant in Cinisello Balsamo, Milan.
“The workplace construction is lifted off the bottom by 4 massive pillars that help the crisscrossed beams sustaining the ground slabs. This daring structural answer made doable a big floor-to-ceiling area in the course of the 4 pillars, harking back to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
“The progressive, unconventional cladding utilised a cloth virtually unprecedented in development: a double shell of strengthened fibreglass and expanded polyurethane that served as a type of curtain. In a delicate contact of irony, the massive home windows resembling portholes look like these of a ship or aircraft.”
The Chicago Chair (1983)
“After prolonged experimentation with new plastic design supplies, which started within the Nineteen Sixties, Mangiarotti got here up with the thought for a chair, whose identify displays his nostalgia for Chicago and demonstrates {that a} single moulded piece of strengthened fibreglass might function the legs, seat and backrest (above, center).
“Probably a response to the well-known Panton Chair, the ironic distinction is the entire reversal of its structural precept, seeing that whereas the Panton resists weight from the rear, the Chicago Chair does so from the entrance. What they share is the rounded part of the again help, which ensures stability.
“Due to its putting plasticity, the chair can virtually be thought of a sculpture.”
Glassworks for Cristallerie Colle (Nineties)
“Curious to check out completely different supplies, Mangiarotti started working with the Cristallerie Colle firm within the 90s, designing a group for most of the people however at top-flight ranges of high quality.
“The glass items replicate virtually the total vary of objects of frequent use: glasses, pitchers, candelabra, tableware and so on. with their handcrafting highlighted by the ergonomic, expressionist shapes of the blown glass. A particular characteristic of Mangiarotti’s items is how they lean ahead, revealing his fondness for dynamic varieties.”
The Image Gallery
“A gallery of drawings introduces [visitors of the exhibition] to the inventive workshop of Mangiarotti, who practised the artwork of designing with colored pencils all through his life, utilizing them extra as a instrument for pondering than for illustrating.
“Grouped by themes and initiatives, the drawings had been executed with numerous strategies on every kind of paper, displaying a inventive fervour rendered all of the extra vivid by colors that time to the eagerness behind the conceptualisation.
“Per Mangiarotti, there have been no ‘completed drawings’: the paper on which he expressed his intentions was the workbench he used to analyse and choose the varieties and features of his remaining merchandise.
“The gathering of drawings covers a variety of functions and sizes – from the stadiums of Catania and Palermo to technical sketches for vases – and highlights the singularity of a design course of in a position to skip from one scale to a different in order that, as a way to spot similarities not instantly seen within the completed works, we have to return and have a look at the drawings.”
Angelo Mangiarotti: When Buildings Take Form is on show at Triennale di Milano in Milan till April 23 2023. See Dezeen Occasions Information for an up-to-date checklist of structure and design occasions happening around the globe.
