Channelbeta - Corrispondenti - Milano - Alberto Rosselli_designer architetto

A collection of projects ranging from architecture to design, that reconstructs the brilliant and polite figure of Alberto Rosselli in the Milanese panorama of the postwar period.

After the exhibition "Diritto d'Autori - il diritto ad un ricordo, il dovere di un omaggio", which tried to arouse the student's passion for the architecture too often calmed, Ghigos carried on their search on the lesson of Milanese architects of the years '60 and '70, this time bringing in light the work of Alberto Rosselli and his reserved yet keen and ironic figure. A figure which, because of historical coincidences and loath temper, has never been carefully studied, relegated to the silence since 1981 - year of the first and last exhibition on his works.

THE RESEARCH

Alberto Rosselli hold a particularly important role in the history of the design: among the first ones to take an interest and start speaking of "industrial design", he founded and directed "Stile Industria" - a magazine born as rib of "Domus" but that soon acquired a complete autonomy and completeness. He was among the promoters of the ADI and as a university lecturer he introduced the concept (extremely innovative for the period) of planning as an act of decision making, thus setting the structural and conceptual foundatuions of the "Area Tecnologica" of the Faculty of Architecture in the Milan Polytechnic.

Many reasons testify why Alberto Rosselli is to be considered as a true protagonist of the architectural postwar scene. Some of these reasons are his complex life, the hard-won relationship with Gio Ponti, the university experience in the difficult Sixties, the contribution given to the birth and to the diffusion of the concept of industrial design, the foundation of the ADI, the important theoretical essays , the editorials of "Stile Industria", which notwithstanding its brief life, from 1954 to 1963, marked the history of the Italian publishing industry in the field of the design.

He was an unsociable protagonist at times, unwilling to be crushed by logics of power which were quite alien to his nature; solitary, for choice, when - literally - he dipped himself in his projects, to which he devoted with stubbornness and from which drew life and energy. Rosselli was also a prickly and ironic person, of an irony somehow british, with which he perhaps learned to defend himself and to counterattack without ever falling in the polemics. He was chaste and reserved, but at the same time amiable, sensitive - perhaps too much, if a criterion of judgment exists for defining a "too much" - kind in his ways, in his gestures and in his silences even more that in the words.

For someone Alberto Rosselli was a pessimist, for others he was more simply an idealist that met with the difficulties of a reality to which he belonged, but to which he often didn't agree.

The exhibition tried to investigate all these manifold activities and the facets of his personality and to correlate them so that could be returned a comprehensive view of Alberto Rosselli's activity and thoughts. For this reason, side by side with a research more tightly bibliographical, have been placed numerous interviews to his friends and collaborators, who have remembered his kind ways and that apparent brittleness of him which, on the contrary, hid an obstinate perseverance.

Rosselli carried out, as a part of his plannng activity, a research with a strong social connotation, consistent with his principles and with his vision of the role of the project and of the planner: in his view "a designer must be the consumers' deputy in Production. The person who interprets consumers' desires like the Prince's Advisor, who is close to but not under him".

His look always tried to find the real demands of the consumer and succeeded in translating them with lightness in technological solutions of sample simplicity and functionality; thus achieving projects of high quality, able to positively affect everyday's life.

In his research the predilection for flexible, never definitive solutions emerges as constant, solutions capable of answering to the different demands of the people; no detail was left to an approximate stadium in his projects, expressions of a stubborn exploration "in the field of the possible", nothing was neglected or defered; he has always cultivated the uncertainty as a value in plannig, however applying it in methodic and rigorous way.

These personal characteristics of him are also traceable during the long and profitable collaboration with Gio Ponti and Antonio Fornaroli in the study Ponti Fornaroli Rosselli, countersigning him as individuality inside the famous study in a period rich in satisfactions, but for some other aspects tormented for the young architect (debated among the respect, the friendship and the thankfulness, but also the success and the explosive exuberance of the uneasy father-in-law).

Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli, Alberto Rosselli and Gio Ponti: the two names have been placed side by side for a long time by the criticis, with an obvious effect of obscuring one against the other, but if both have passed the implacable judgment of history and their theoretical searches and their works are still studied, it is because they were two people and two planners which completed each other - and therefore they were different. Very different.

Therefore their works must be appraised with different criterions and suitable parameters, to fully gather their meaning and value.

The exhibition was set with this objective, trying to bring back the attention on the Planner Alberto Rosselli; a cultured man, careful, passioned, a Planner that has also worked with the Planner Gio Ponti.

The research was therefore developed on more than one level, in the attempt to fully analyze Alberto Rosselli's figure: as a man, as a designer and as an architect (three independent keys of reading, that go on separately only to recompose themselves later on, to intersect and to constantly overlap, unfolding a whole life devoted to the project, a life in which personality, experiences, meetings, attitudes and formal results become inseparable), but also as lecturer - Alberto Rosselli and his university experience - and as theorist - Alberto Rosselli and the vicissitudes of "Stile Industria".

THE PREPARATION

The exhibition explored all the fields quoted above and faithfully returned the results of the research: The choice was to let the projects and the memoirs of whom has known Alberto Rosselli speak directly, without interposing too much personal critical interpretations, besides, the type of exposure allowed a both independent and simultaneous reading of the different points of view showed.

Personal photos, important stages of the life of Alberto Rosselli or simply snapshots that portrait him in family, with his friends Zanuso and Sambonet, in vacation or in study, found their place on a long and continuous red band - a sort of Arianna's thread joining the single tables of the exposed projects - side to side with pleasant and relevant anecdotes that have pointed out the most private aspect of the architect. An aspect often neglected, thus able to explain the planning decisions of a designer.

Along the band, placed at regular intervals, to articulate the intellectual growth of the planner and his different "cultural adventures", there also were to be found essays Roselli's friends, collaborators, university assistants or editors (Lisa Ponti, Franca Santi Gualteri, Isao Hosoe, Gillo Dorfles, Cesare Casati and Adriana Baglioni), who have focused the contributions given by Alberto Rosselli in its varied activities, thus reconstructing a journey professionally and culturally coherent, careful to the technological aspects of the project as well to the social ones, extremely methodic and rigorous, intended by the architect as possible mean to improve the life and the condition of the man.

The red band connected - symbolically and physically - over 30 explanatory tables of the projects, ranging from architecture to industrial design: from the first experimentations of the years '50 (of a Rosselli little more than thirty years old), to his last works, concluded by the collaborators of the study after his premature disappearance in 1976, when he was 55 years old.

The exposed projects spaced from an amazing - for its ability to anticipate the times - electrical massager, dated 1955, to the 1974-75 rural house in Agro di Foggia or to the swimming pool of Prè Saint Didier, completed in 1977. Between these years, many other projects, some realized, others remained to the stadium of simple prototypes, however strongly influencing the following production: for all we'll recall the famous "mobile House" proposed to the 1972 MoMA.

Other relevants projects are the coach "Meteor", designed with Isao Hosoe and rewarded with the "Compasso d'Oro" in 1970 - referring to which K. Koenig said that "it is the only one in which the inside space favors the formation of activity of group making the time passed on the highways less boring"; the innovative experimentations on the modular systems - such as the system "Talking Office" produced by Facomet, the small table for Bilumen, the system "Dune"; the famous hair dryer "Auretta" in which the planner has operated a decisive tipological revision of the object; the whole set for Saporiti: the poltroncines "Jumbo", the armchairs "Play", "Moby Dick" and "P110", the chair and the table "Jarana": objects with a sinuous and seductive shape, almost playful and however functional, in which the designer has experimented the new potentialities offered by fiberglass.

Other projects showed were the modular cart for Kartell, the researches on prefabrication of baths (the "Unità bagno" made of PRFV for Montecatini, the "Unità bagno" with accessories for I.C.S.), the furniture for office of the Arflex, the furnitures for BBB emmebonacina...

With regard to the architectures, it's impossible not to remember the building for "Il Corriere della Sera", the researches on the skyscrapers ("Tower 400 meters high", "Tower Belisario") and on a structure for offices with movable floors, the villas (at Foggia, at Nole Canavese), the urban residential buildings (in Milan, near P.ta Venezia and Marina street), the shops....

This job of reconstruction of the work of Alberto Rosselli "man-designer-architect" was not only documented through original drawings, sketches, photos, essays, but also directly exposing some objects projected by Alberto Rosselli and some maquettes of his architectures.

The objects and the models have been exposed on a modular system of tables expressly designed, a system which on pourpose recalls, with its shape and dimensions, the Rosselli's "Talking Office"; the only variation introduced concerned the progress of the various modules, not placed all at a same height, but on the contrary at different quotas, as requested by the type of the exposed object. The attempt was to show the single objects from theirs usual "view of use", maintaining that is the seats to quota zero and the dishes at table-height.

Results a preparation that maintains the sinuosity of the "Talking Office" system, with the merit to easily be aggregabile, detachable and extremely flexible - therefore adaptable to the different types of spaces in which the show could move - economic, but also in degree of connotare meaningfully an environment.

FRAGMENTS OF MEMOIRS

"The search of a methodology, as a systematic address for the planning, filled the most intense years of Rosselli's didactic activity, from '65 to '72. [...] Rosselli taught the students to decompose and to recompose the problems and to face them reducing them to a system of smaller problems, [...] he brought back the unity to the whole of the parts, so that each could be studied in the detail, with love and fury and nothing was left to the case, to the uncontrolled inventiveness."

(Adriana Baglioni)

"With his magazine "Stile Industria" he was among the first ones to give the dignity of a scientific research to an activity considered as a subspecies of architecture. The design."

(Gillo Dorfles)

"The airplane that travels faster than the sound makes itself feel only when it has gone away.

At times it leaves a deep thunder that penetrates in the heart without troubling our five senses, but a lot of times it passes in total silence because it flies so high that the rarefied air of the stratosphere doesn't succeed in transmitting the sonorous wave.

Rosselli knew that shouting in a loud voice in the noisy environment only increases the level of the background noise."

(Isao Hosoe)

"He spoke few and he liked to be caustic. Its wisecracks were famous and a bit naughty, for choice. I have always suspected that this was his way to hide a certain sweetness.He was "tenebrous", fascinating, interesting. [...]. He looked like he was distracted but few things escaped him."

(Franca Santi Gualteri)

"Rosselli has certainly suffered the charm and the bursting creativity of Gio Ponti, his master, partner and father-in-law. creativeness, but its bashful and reflexive character has always allowed him to cut out him, inside the Study, one activity of his original progettuale, independent and above all of great cultural thickness. [He has] ferried the project for the industry from the romantic rationalism of the fifties to the creative design of the following decade, [...] with his/her particular way to insert him, with respect and dignity, in the preexisting urban and cultural fabric.

This is the key to read the whole work of Rosselli, characterized by an aesthetical world that he/she sees design and architecture belonging to the same sphere of project and civilization."

(Cesare Casati)

"They were different. Gio Ponti absorbed in the adventure of his own thought and his musical fantastic anticipations or postponements, Rosselli also alert to the adventure of other people's thought. Such an intense intellectual curiosity, in his silent way, to do of him, in appearance a closed man, in reality a man open to the complexities of the social moment, and also to the art."

(Lisa Ponti)

"A modesty that hid a modesty, not a timidity. An intense sense of the complexity of the world - to avoid its noise - bashfully loving it with every part of himself."

(Lisa Ponti)

Gruppo Ghigos