Carlo Mollino: An Important Italian Designer

Written by: Alice Braglia

In this essay I am going to analyze the artistic path of Carlo Mollino, how is work had been influenced by his life experiences and passions, and how his eclectic creativity had crossovers from one discipline to another. I decided to write this essay on Carlo Mollino because I had the chance to learn how open minded he was and how his complex personality shone throughout all of his work. There are many books about Mollino and his wide production, but In this essay I’m going to try to summarise his artistic inclinations and give us an almost complete view on the many disciplines he loved. It will be interesting to see how such a talented artist found his way through many different activities to express himself.

Carlo Mollino, born in Torino in 1905, was an architect, designer, artisan, painter, photographer, writer, but also an airplane pilot, mountain and ski enthusiast, who decided to live a life that involved each of his passions. In his drawings we can see his love for speed and movement, and his deep photographic research. He had a recognizable and disruptive personality, being at the same time extrovert and solitary. He was once credited as saying, "Everything is permissible as long as it is fantastic." That credo was certainly reflected throughout his work. Carlo Mollino was the son of Eugenio Mollino, an engineer; he studied Engineering and Architecture in Turin and he graduated in 1931, while working at his father’s studio, but assuming a totally different professional path. He became a ski instructor, producing also some photographs and drawings that would be later be featured in his book ‘Introduction to downhill’ published in the 50s. In 1949 he became a teacher and his career began when the modernist movement reached his peak. Mollino’s style can best be defined by his interior designs, which feature a mixture of soft and sinuous lines from the natural world and surreal fantasies. In the 50s he worked at his automotive designs to then go back to his architecture activity, abandoned for a few years. Carlo Mollino died in 1973 from a heart attack in his father’s studio while still working. He was a complete and eclectic artist of the Italian Renaissance, whose work represents an harmonious meeting between science and art, logic and poetry, beauty and practicality.

Talking about his architectural activity, he designed the House on the Agra plateau in Varese in 1952, one of the most known works of Mollino. It was realized for the Cattaneo family, and he worked on it for a few years taking into account many different proposals. Mollino also designed the furnishings of the house, unique pieces that are still there. The entire project is based on the careful combination of traditional elements (such as wood and local stone) and the modern construction technique of reinforced concrete, that turns into an expressive element.

The same year he contributed to the restructuring of RAI Auditorium of Turin, together with Aldo Morbelli. They made many improvements to the structure such as the acoustic and the visibility of the stage, the expansion of the entrance and the ticket office, and they placed an audio/video recorder system together with a pipe organ on the back.

In 1955 Mollino designed Casa del Sole in Cervinia, which is seen as a commercial operation for the town that was becoming one of the most known tourist destination for winter. For Mollino the house had to be like a ‘vertical village’, opposed to the folkloristic style of the chalets. He designed a high and dominant building, consistent with the location, that had to be ‘a filter where you enter a citizen and you leave a skier’.

Carlo Mollino had a strong personality and taste that would transpire through each of his works, especially in his interior designs: many are the elements referable to the human body, mostly female, or animal bodies. His life experiences were the central aspects of his work: he used to take most of his inspiration from aeronautics, motoring and downhill, aiming to achieve the maximum precision required to reproduce the trajectory of a female body or mechanical means in space. In this way, Mollino used to create, with extreme skill, shapes derived from nature, re-elaborated them and mixed them with elements typical of Art Nouveau, Surrealism and also Baroque and Rococò style. All of his pieces are unique and experimental, because although many of his projects would have been well suited to a serial production, Mollino never designed for the big industry: he relied on the small workshop artisans to build its furniture and its chairs, having so the possibility to make small changes and corrections during the production process. Although the furniture production of the 40s was still based on the ideals of the Bauhaus, Mollino’s furniture designs were free from any geometric and protorational scheme, out of the architectural tradition. He seemed to ignore the market, but he ended up ‘governing’ the taste of the Turin bourgeoisie.

Following these ideals, Carlo Mollino designed the interiors for Casa Minola, Casa Orengo, Casa Rivetti and Casa Mollino between 1945 and 1960. Their furnishings, often produced as unique pieces or in limited series, merge the use of construction techniques with the experimentation of new materials and new technologies, such as curved plywood with overlapping layers. In particular, the 'cold' curvature technique of plywood is what made his chairs, tables, and armchairs famous in the early 50s, and that’s’ what made possible the realization of the almost erotic sinuous lines that clearly referred to the female body, the artist’s favorite subject to photograph. For example, one of his most famous furniture designs is the magnificent Arabesco Table, designed in 1949 for Casa Orengo. With its bentwood structure and crystal table, it clearly refers to the grace and the soft lines of a female body laying down. Mollino also loved to experiment the bentwood technique on many chair designs, with anthropomorphic lines inspired by nature, that are always featured in his interiors for the houses. In the Reale Table designed in 1949, we can see the aeronautic inspiration in the elaborated wood base, just like in the Cadma Lamp from 1947 we can spot the helix shape.

What I found very interesting about the artist, it’s his eclectic creativity that expresses itself in any way possible: designing, painting, building, writing, and taking photographs, which was a very big source of inspiration of his. In 1973, after his death, 1200 surviving Polaroids never exhibited during his life, were found: they are all eroticized images of women, but the subject is not sex. It’s clear that more than the human body Mollino was attracted to the aesthetic abstraction of beauty as a lifestyle; the photographs had been composed, staged and directed with the desire to conquer nature with artifice. Mollino used to bring women to his villa and photograph them in sets featuring velvet curtains, wigs, furs, champagne, animal skins, leather, lingerie and the 1960’s haute-couture. The majority of the shots are taken from the same angle, with the female subject on the stage-like platform that Mollino had installed in the main room of his villa.

As an architect and designer, Mollino spent his life crafting forms to accommodate the human body, but in his photography there is the apparent desire to reverse the order of supremacy and make the human form an element of design, in facts, here are strong echoes between the shapes of his human figures and those in his furniture. Mollino’s photography consists of small, unretouched and anonymous pieces of private collection that reflect his own desires: he never got married, and it’s unclear if his life had a love; what is clear is that he felt deep love for things. There is a nymphomaniac something in Mollino’s work, as if the pictures were taken compulsively, and perhaps without joy, as part of a doomed project to reach an unattainable ideal: the tragic desire to keep thousands of women in an empty house.

About his photography there has just been a great exhibition in Torino, at Camera – centro italiano per la fotografia, called ‘The magic eye of Carlo Mollino’, that showed the whole photographic production of the artist from 1934 to 1973, with over 500 images taken from the Turin Polytechnic Archive.

In conclusion, most of Carlo Mollino’s production was in architecture and furniture design, but it was very interesting to see how he was lead by his passions and hobbies, like photography and physical activities, to create beautiful pieces of furniture. He was so passionate about his hobbies that he didn’t leave anything behind: every feeling and experience that he had would come together to create magnificent designs; and this is what I think it’s the winning part about his work: he was honest, true and passionate. He went down his independent path following his own instinct and talent, and he ended up winning the taste of everyone.