Every question has its historical context. For example, asking ‘where do architects live?’ wouldn’t have made any sense 50 years ago, or to put it another way, the response would have been loud and clear: architects lived in incubators, homes that were the fertile terrain in which design was born, tested, achieving a high degree of humanization and then, once produced industrially, spreading its wings for all the world to see.
Experimentation, trial and error, variations, everything took place in the architect’s home. And when there was no more space, it was the homes of friends, lovers, even unwitting clients that were transformed into research labs and prototyping workshops.
From 1948 through the ‘60s, Italian design was born in the home, finding the right scale, those perfect proportions that were the envy of the world, by measuring itself against architecture. In that unrepeatable epoch, architecture was able to give form to the city on the one hand, and to concretize itself in objects on the other. Architecture was the matrix of the city and of objects.
Is this still the case? I don’t think so, not always. Contemporary design is often affected by a pervasive gigantism and a perverse narcissism. Showrooms are crowded with oversized objects that are often, exaggeratedly, portraits of their designers.
What is the ‘cure’ for these persistent pathologies? The cure is very simple, within anyone’s power to effectuate, for it lies within our very homes, our interiors.
Let us not build a home around a sofa, but rather design a sofa for that home, as Gio Ponti, Carlo Mollino, Franco Albini, Carlo Scarpa, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Ignazio Gardella, Vittoriano Viganò, Umberto Riva and Toni Cordero did, back in the day. The litany of names could go on and on, because I am convinced that retracing the history of Italian interiors means reconstructing the history of design, and that looking inside the home means looking at design.
‘Where Architects Live’ is the title of the exhibition/event at the Salone del Mobile.Milan 2014. Starting from this premise, Marco Romanelli offers reflections on the relationship between interior architecture and design.
Marco Romanelli, born in Trieste in 1958, is an architect and critic. From 1986 to 1994 he was editor of Domus, and from 1995 to 2007, of Abitare. He has published numerous monographs on figures such as Gio Ponti, Bruno Munari, Joe Colombo and Gino Sarfatti. Noteworthy among the many exhibitions he has curated are ‘Aperto Vetro’ (2000) at the Museo Correr in Venice; ‘Gio Ponti: A World’ (2002-03), at the Design Museum, London, the NAI in Rotterdam and the Triennale di Milano; ‘Bruno Munari: Vietato l’accesso agli addetti al lavoro’ (2007), Tokyo; ‘Design una storia Italiana’ (2011) at Trajan’s Market, Rome; ‘Gino Sarfatti’ (2012), Triennale di Milano. As a designer he has worked with Driade, Arflex, O luce, Bosa, Fiam, Glas, Nodus, Azzurra, Valsecchi 1918, and others.
