Gae Aulenti

Gae Aulenti was born in 1927 at Palazzolo dello Stella, in the Province of Udine.
After spending her early adolescence in Biella, she studied in Florence and Turin during the war, after which she opted for Milan and the Politecnico, where she studied under Ernesto Nathan Rogers. She completed her degree in 1953, and remained in Milan to launch her career.
From 1955 to 1965, she worked in the editorial department of the design magazine Casabella, which was edited by Rogers and central to architectural debate at the time. This is where she laid the foundations for her identity.
Aulenti's interest in linking the different aspects of the discipline of architecture was already expressed in her earliest work. As an industrial designer, she created numerous objects initially conceived to complement her architectural projects. The most famous include the Pipistrello and King Sun lamps for the Olivetti showrooms in Paris (1967) and Buenos Aires (1968), the Bugia lamp for the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (1986), and the Cestello lamp for Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1986), the last two designed with Piero Castiglioni. More generally, the objects designed by Aulenti, developed for companies such as Knoll, Fontana Arte, Kartell, and Artemide, were never purely decorative, serving instead to complement the architectural space around them.
In the 1980s, Aulenti designed the Museé d'Orsay, converting the interior of the Gare d'Orsay into exhibition space and thus transforming a former train station into a museum of 19th-century French art. At the same time, she designed the Centre Pompidou's Musée National d'Art Moderne, also in Paris, and headed the renovation of Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Fiat had commissioned the latter project in view of using the space for temporary exhibitions, many of which were designed by Aulenti herself over the course of more than 15 years. For Aulenti, exhibition design was an opportunity to create an interplay between architecture and art. Indeed, the components of her designs were never subordinate to the objects on display, instead interacting with them to generate dialogue. As an exhibition designer, Gae Aulenti often worked alongside Germano Celant, with whom she collaborated on the exhibit 'The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968' at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1994), transforming the interior by Frank Lloyd Wright.
In parallel, Aulenti developed an intense relationship with theater, starting in the early 1970s. Her first collaboration with Luca Ronconi dates to 1974, and the two went on to create some of the most important productions of the late 20th century. In particular, they founded a theater design workshop in Prato, the Laboratorio di progettazione teatrale, where they worked together from 1976 to 1979, staging Pier Paolo Pasolini's Calderón, Euripides's Le baccanti, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's La torre, all directed by Ronconi and with newly designed spaces for each production. Aulenti's work in the opera world was equally important, designing sets for La Scala and the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, where she was instrumental, along with Claudio Abbado and Ronconi, in the revival of Rossini's Viaggio a Reims.
Among the projects that best express her understanding of architecture as an "art of the city", we should note the new side access to the Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence (1990); the Italian Pavilion for the Seville Expo '92 (1992); Spazio Oberdan in Milan, the new home of the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (1999); the conversion of the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome into a space for temporary exhibitions (1999); the redevelopment of Piazzale Cadorna in Milan, with the installation of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's sculpture Needle, Thread and Knot (2000); the Museo and Dante metro stations in Naples, with the redesign of Piazza Cavour and Piazza Dante (2002); Città Studi Biella, a satellite campus of the Politecnico of Turin (2000–2004); and Piazza San Giovanni in Gubbio (2003).
The new Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, designed by Aulenti, was opened to the public in 2003; the new building for the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo was inaugurated in 2005; and the architect's long years of work on the museum of Catalan art in Barcelona, the Museu nacional d'art de Catalunya, begun in 1984, were finally completed in 2006. 2006 was also the year of her renovation of the Palavela in Turin, one of the venues for the Olympic Winter Games. In 2009, Aulenti designed the Swank boutique in Beijing and the library and cultural center in Paderno Dugnano, just outside Milan. Between 2003 and 2010, she designed the waste-to-energy plant in Forlì. For the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification, she renovated the Perugia airport, inaugurated in 2012. That same year, she completed work on Palazzo Branciforte in Palermo, for Fondazione Sicilia.
Her most prestigious awards and honors include: Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (Paris, 1987); Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects (1990); the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale for Architecture (Tokyo, 1991); Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Rome, 1995); Honorary Degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, 2001) and the Triennale di Milano's Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement (2012).