Gae Aulenti
Gaetana "Gae" Emilia Aulenti was an Italian architect and designer. Aulenti began her career in the early 1950s, establishing herself as one of the few prominent female architects in post-war Italy.
Although modernism was the predominant international architectural style throughout much of the 20th century, Aulenti stepped away from its tenets to embrace neo-liberty, an architectural and design theory which upheld the relevance of tradition and artistic freedom within the modern aesthetic.
Throughout her career, Aulenti applied her knowledge and broad expertise to a wide range of projects spanning from furniture, lighting, and product design to interiors and exhibition design, theatre stage sets, historical preservation and large-scale architectural projects.
Aulenti is widely acknowledged for transforming the Gare d'Orsay to the Musée d'Orsay. She was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d' Honneur and the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.
Early life and education
Aulenti was born in Palazzolo dello Stella in the Friuli region of northeast Italy to Aldo Aulenti, an accountant and his wife, Virginia Gioia, a school teacher. The Aulenti family, with ancestral origins in Calabria, Apulia and Campania, included her paternal grandfather, who served as a magistrate, and her maternal grandfather, who was a physician.When Aulenti was a child, her family moved to Biella, in the Piedmont region in northern Italy. Aulenti attended a visual arts high-school in Florence; however, during World War II, she was compelled to return to Biella where she continued her studies privately. Reflecting on her life, Aulenti remarked that she was acquainted with several partisans in Piedmont, who placed their trust in her. She would carry out small missions for the Allies while pretending to be on a leisurely outing to the countryside.
Although Aulenti initially studied visual arts, she saw an opportunity to contribute to the rebuilding of Italy and in 1948 she enrolled in the architectural program at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Other alumni from Aulenti's generation at the Polytechnic included Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Franca Stagi and Cini Boeri.
Milan was attractive to students, like Aulenti, because it had been an open city during World War II and was rich with culture and intellectual life. Among Milanese cultural figures of that time, Aulenti recalled the film-maker, Luchino Visconti and the author, Elio Vittorini but also international figures such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Aulenti married fellow Polytechnic alumnus Francesco Buzzi in 1959. They had a daughter, Giovanna Buzzi but divorced three years later. Giovanna was close to her mother and saw her as a mentor. Aulenti's granddaughter also became an architect.
Architectural and design philosophy
Approximately one third of Milan's built structures were destroyed in the hostilities of World War II. The post-war reconstruction of Milan involved large architectural and urban design projects. Architects faced the problem of reconstructing a city of renowned historical and cultural city edifices in a way that acknowledged modern architectural materials, techniques and style. It was in this setting that Aulenti began her career.Aulenti said,
I am convinced that architecture is tied to the polis, it is an art of the city, of the foundation, and as such it is necessarily related and conditioned by the context in which it is born. Place, time, and culture create that architecture, instead of another.From 1955 to 1965, Aulenti was a graphic designer at Casabella-continuità, a Milanese magazine focussed on avant-garde architecture and design. Working under editor-in-chief Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Aulenti examined neo-liberty, a novel Italian architectural theory. Neo-liberty posited that there is a continuity between historical and modern architectural styles rather than an end of one and the beginning of another and that elements from the past can be used to enhance contemporary design. This is counter to modernism which eschews ornamentation and places function before form. Aulenti explained,
The architecture in which I would like to recognize myself derives from three fundamental capacities of an aesthetic and not a moral order. The first is the analytical one, in the sense that we must be able to recognize the continuity of both conceptual and physical urban and geographical traces, as specific essences of architecture. The second is the synthetic one, that is to know how to operate the necessary synthesis in order to render priority and evident the principles of the architecture. The third is the prophetic one, typical of artists, poets and inventors.Aulenti's interpretation of neo-liberty is exemplified in her first furniture piece, the Sgarsul chair, crafted from bent beech wood with a slung leather seat containing soft polyurethane padding. The design of the Sgarsul chair draws inspiration from Michael Thonet's Rocking Chair No. 1. In her later life, Aulenti said of her work,
I have always tried to make my work unclassifiable, not to accept abstract rules, not to confine myself to specializations, but instead to deal with different disciplines. The theatre, for example, to be able to analyze literary and musical texts. The design of objects as a complementary world to architectural spaces. Architecture as a basic passion where theory and practice must intertwine. I believe architecture is an interdisciplinary intellectual work, a work in which building science and art are extremely integrated.
Career
Industrial design
Aulenti had a prolific career in industrial design.Her Locus Solus furniture collection, introduced in 1964, was inspired by the country estate featured in Raymond Roussel's 1912 novel of the same name. The collection comprised chairs, a table, an adjustable lamp, a sofa, a sun lounger, and a bench, all manufactured from tubular cold-formed steel by the Poltronova furniture company. The Locus Solus collection was used as set decoration in the film, La Piscine. In 2023, a replica collection in off-white and yellow was produced for commercial sale.
Lamps designed by Aulenti were notable for their style, innovation and function. For example, the Giova lamp designed for Fontana Arte, a lighting and furniture manufacturer, was a centripetal object that functioned as a lamp, a planter, an aroma diffuser and an objet d'art. The Pipistrello lamp was another of Aulenti's early yet enduring designs. The lamp featured a neck that could extend by 20 cm, allowing it to be positioned on either a table or the floor. It was manufactured by Elio Martinelli, the founder of the Martinelli Luce lighting company, using poly molding. The Ruspa table lamp was a modular group of four lights. Direct light and indirect light from imbedded reflectors was controlled by angling of lamp's head. The Ruspa was unconventional as it was crafted in lacquered aluminium instead of plastic.
Olivetti, the maker of precision office machines, engaged Aulenti to design their showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. Office machines, such as typewriters, were displayed on structures of white laminate steps accented by radiating spokes of dark polished wood. This design drew inspiration from the steps of a piazza and the repeating triangular patterns found in traditional African arts and crafts. In the centre of the display, a tall red structure, resembling a space capsule, represented the future. Lighting was provided by Aulenti's Girasole floor lamp in which nine semicircles of clear plastic were set around a central spine and a concealed light bulb. Aulenti describes her work for Olivetti as the pivotal starting point of her international career.
In 1968, Aulenti designed showrooms in Turin, Zurich and Brussels for the car manufacturer, Fiat. The cars were showcased single file, each on an inclined metal platform set against mirrored walls. The customer explored a central viewing point, while the cars were arranged, as though driving on a race track, around them. Furniture for the show room was produced from Aulenti's designs by the Kartell furniture company. At the time, Kartell was experimenting with injection moulding.
Aulenti collaborated with the French fashion house Louis Vuitton to design a watch accompanied by a matching pen and silk scarf. The design, known as the "Monterey" was released in two versions. The Monterey I featured elements reminiscent of an elaborately decorated pocket watch while the Monterey II stood out with its sleek black polished ceramic case. In 2025 Louis Vuitton relaunched the Monterey model inspired by the design created by Gae Aulenti.
Aulenti also designed a line of porcelain sanitary ware, which she called, the "Orsay" collection.
Architectural design
Musée d'Orsay
The Gare d'Orsay was built on left bank of the Seine in 1900 to a plan by Victor Laloux. The Beaux-Arts style terminus station and the connected hotel served passengers travelling from southwest France to the capital.In 1975, the French president, François Mitterrand, asked the French architectural firm, ACT to commence an adaptive reuse project to convert the Gare d'Orsay into a new museum, the Musée d'Orsay.
Initially, Aulenti was assigned solely to the interior design of the new museum. However, due to disagreements between ACT and the curators, her role expanded to encompass the overall architectural planning of the project. Aulenti successfully advocated for changes to the ACT design, which the curators believed was overly tied to neo-classical aesthetics and excessively ornate. In the final plan, however, some features of the Gare d'Orsay were preserved, including the mansard roof, an ornate art nouveau clock, large busts of Mercury and the rose patterned tiles covering the ceiling.
Aulenti divided the station into three levels. On the ground floor, the main corridor was re-aligned to the long axis of the building and set on a gentle slope to form a sculpture garden. Limestone tiles, in various shades of white, were attached to the surfaces of the ramp, platforms on the ramp and, at one end of the corridor, two new towers. The old art nouveau clock is balanced by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's sculpture, The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere.
Balconies overlooking the main corridor were added to the mezzanine and upper level. Natural light enters the building from the original large, glass, barrel-vault ceiling, windows facing the Rue de Lille and from new oculi. By adding artificial lighting, Aulenti was able to achieve a uniform quality of illumination throughout the museum.
Mitterrand inaugurated the Musée d'Orsay on 1 December 1986. The museum's interior design has since been updated to feature halogen lighting, dark wood floors, and grey walls.
Charles Jencks, cultural theorist and architectural historian, described the Musée d'Orsay as an example of a "postmodern museum", where there is tension due to the past needing to exist in the present and the artistic in the academic. Jencks said, "The train shed, a symbol of nineteenth-century power and materialism, meets a thirteenth-century cathedral layout in a twentieth-century temple to the contradictions of nineteenth-century art."
He wrote of the museum,
The linear, suiting trains, also suits historical sequence with startling results. They give a clear beginning, middle and end to the gentle stroll through history. Overhead, the wide barrel vault of the old station spreads a generous light that pulls one gently up the progression of French art. The floor and the visitor mount slowly, too... Gae Aulenti has articulated the walls to either side of this nave space in heavy Egyptian tones, but also with horizontal streamlines that push forward... thus, the railway station becomes a cathedral with the left aisle housing the avant-garde and the right aisle holding the academy. Up the middle, the nave mixes the two competitors but not indiscriminately.The new museum opened to the public on 9 December 1986 to mixed review. Paul Goldberger, architectural critic, wrote in The New York Times,
Unfortunately, the results of this ambitious project are, architecturally speaking, not natural at all. They are contrived, awkward and uncomfortable. The newly created Musée dAulenti received the Chevalier de Légion d'honneur in 1987.'Orsay may be the most ambitious conversion of an old building into a museum in the modern history of Paris, but it is also a work of architecture that is deeply insensitive both to the original Gare d'Orsay and to the works of art it is supposed to be protecting and displaying. It will do little to advance the art of museum design, and it may well set the business of architectural recycling back a generation.