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Gae Aulenti: Italy's Most Talked-About Architect
| Article
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14822 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
1,751 Words |
| Author
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Nancy G. Heller
Nancy G. Heller is the author of Women Artists: An
Illustrated History (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) and
is currently preparing an Antarctica appreciation textbook for
Random House. |
"I like trying to do the impossible," Gae Aulenti said in a recent interview. "Challenges stimulate me." Perhaps this explains why the sixty-year-old Milanese grandmother has taken on a series of increasingly complex projects and, in the process, built a reputation as Europe's most controversial architect.
People began talking about Aulenti in a big way in 1964, when she created an eccentric, highly surreal installation for Milan's Thirteenth Triennale of Architecture and Design: a staircase filled with life-size cutouts based on Picasso's 1922 painting Women Running on Beach. The divided opinions on her work reached their high point two years ago, with the opening of Paris' Musee d'Orsay, a turn-of-the-century train station redesigned to display nineteenth-century art. Many observers have called the museum a masterpiece, but just as many dismiss it as a disaster. Joseph Acebillo, the director of planning for the city of Barcelona, where Aulenti is currently reworking the neoclassical Palacio Nacional de Monjuich, calls her "by far the most important architect working in Europe today." But some critics question whether Aulenti can properly be labeled an architect at all, since she has never designed a new building -except for private residents--and is thus perhaps more an interior renovator/designer.
Difficult Tasks
Despite--or, perhaps, because of--such contradictory evaluations of her work, Aulenti continues to try her hand at new, difficult, and unusual tasks. These include a whole host of theatrical set and costume designs, and, most recently, the installation in Venice of a fascinating exhibition, the first major one ever held on the art of the ancient Phoenicians. Interestingly, the same challenges that have faced Aulenti in her many art museum projects of the past decade recur in the Phoenician show: how to modify a preexisting structure to most effectively display objects from a very different place and time, and how to design an exhibition to reinforce the curator's overall theme. The ways which Aulenti has approached these issues help make The Phoenicians as intriguing as she herself is and have shed welcome light on a long-ignored civilization.
The Phoenicians were the people who invented the phonetic alphabet, the technique of glassblowing, and a highly prized purple dye. These people were famous throughout the ancient world for their skills as navigators, colonizers, merchants soldiers, and craftsmen. And yet, until twenty-five years ago, scholars could not even agree about who the Phoenicians were.
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