Carlo Mollino

He was the only son of Jolanda Testa (1884-1966) and Eugenio Mollino (1873-1953), a prolific engineer who built more than 300 buildings of the most diverse types.

Carlo Mollino (6 May 1905 – 27 August 1973) was an Italian architect, designer, photographer and educator.

Carlo Mollino was born on 6 May 1905, in Turin, a major industrial city and cultural centre in northwest Italy.

The building, which he himself defined as a "flying chalet", is inspired by the traditional Walser alpine architecture that Mollino studied in the summer of 1930 and for which he produced remarkably analytical drawings.

His 1930s interior designs are particularly significant since Mollino was one of the very first architects, internationally speaking, to merge Surrealism with the Modern Movement, effectively responding to the question of what Surrealist Modern architecture might look like.

Carlo Mollino graduated in architecture in July 1931 at the Royal Superior School of Architecture in Turin.

Before and after graduation he collaborated with his father who mentored him in the design of technical architectural elements and had him oversee construction sites.

In the summer of 1931, right after graduation from architecture school in Turin, Mollino travelled to Berlin where he met Erich Mendelsohn.

Only in 1933 he began his personal career winning a competition for the construction of an office building in Cuneo and writing "The Life of Oberon", a fictional short story published in the architectural magazine Casabella.

The direct contact with Expressionism had a lasting impact on his architectural design as can already be seen in the first building he completed, the Farmers' Federation in Cuneo (Sede Federazione Agricoltori, 1933–35).

In 1933 Mollino published a multi-part short story entitled The Life of Oberon (Vita di Oberon), in the prominent architectural journal Casabella.

It is a personal manifesto of his way of looking at and practising architecture written as prose fiction.

It is with this manifesto, which bears traces of Futurism for which he had a youthful infatuation, that Mollino symbolically began a creative journey in which he would consistently combine a dual role as architect and storyteller.

In 1934 Mollino began to explore Surrealism, a movement that remained a constant source of fascination throughout his life, publishing in August his second short story, The Duke’s Lover (L’amante del duca, 1934–36), a dreamlike fiction whose protagonist is the imaginary architect Faust.The Horse Riding Club of Turin (Società Ippica Torinese, 1937–40), is Mollino's first masterpiece and his first opportunity to give shape to a modern surrealist architecture that extended his interior designs and furniture completed in the 1930s in order to “move the concepts of surreal interior space towards an intransigently functional unity".

In the 1940s he began to write essays on architecture and from 1949 up until his death he taught at the Faculty of Architecture in Turin, becoming a full professor in 1953.

In 1941, Mollino published an article about the Turinese architect-engineer Alessandro Antonelli made famous by his towering Mole, which reveals the beginning of a strong interest in the “organic”, not to be understood as a reference to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright; rather he was interested in the structures of animal and plant organisms as a source of investigation and inspiration for his designs ranging from coat hangers to buildings.

In those same years Mollino theorized a new form of “synthetic eclecticism” based on a consideration of architecture as being a language.

During this period of time dominated by the Second World War, Mollino wrote a number of articles and books about art, architecture, photography, and skiing; he wrote with the point of view of a practising designer, thus further consolidating his identity of architect and storyteller.

The Lago Nero Sled Station is part of a group of projects such as the unbuilt Casa Capriata (1945) and the Casa del Sole (1945–54) in Cervinia that are inspired by traditional vernacular architecture reworked in modernist terms.

In 1945, together with the sculptor Umberto Mastroianni, Mollino won the competition for a war memorial that was completed in 1947 for the Monumental Cemetery on the outskirts of Turin.

Just as the war ended, he put into practice his ideas about architecture as language by designing the most influential of his buildings, the Lago Nero Sled Station (Slittovia del Lago Nero, 1946–1947).

Its structure is made up of cutting-edge Vierendeel trusses integrated with a traditional interlocking log enclosure; Mollino thus created an extraordinarily dynamic and three-dimensional building.

Carlo Mollino did not marry and had no children, he experienced an important love story with the sculptor Carmelina Piccolis between 1948 and 1955.

During the war years he wrote a volume of photographic history and criticism, Message from the Darkroom (Il Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura, published in 1949), and a manual of skiing technique, Introduction to Downhill Skiing (Introduzione al Discesismo, published in 1950).

In 1950 he won the competition for the redesign of the interior of Turin's RAI Auditorium within an existing building.

He was not an industrial designer, yet he tackled the problem of industrial production and especially his last designs, those between 1950 and 1953, would have well-suited mass-production, even though he never pursued such a possibility.

In 1952 he designed the Casa Cattaneo on a site overlooking the Lake Maggiore; the two-story house is composed of a long stretching cantilevered beam supported at one end by two leg-shaped pillars, resembling an animal crouching on the lawn slope, ready to jump.

The death of his father in December 1953 threw Mollino into a personal crisis that eventually led him to abandon his architectural practice for several years in favour of other activities such as automobile design, flying aerobatics and nude photography.

In 1955 he designed a car, the, which competed that year in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

In 1956 he began to fly specializing in aerobatics and later participated in Italian and European competitions.

Finally, in 1959 he returned to architecture participating in the competition for an exhibition pavilion to be erected in Turin on the occasion of the celebration of the hundred years of Italy's unification.

From this moment on, his large-scale urban buildings, which continue to function today, are characterized by reinforced concrete structures; these include the Chamber of Commerce of Turin (1965–73) and the Regio Opera House (Teatro Regio di Torino, 1973).

The Regio Opera House, an important part of the monumental Piazza Castello, provides fantastic spaces in which Mollino translates the imaginary visions of Piranesi's Prisons into a labyrinthine brutalist curved space on four levels that constitute the foyer of the theatre.

Carlo Mollino's furniture design is undoubtedly the most recognized part of his work; his pieces reached the highest prices on the international 20th-century art and design market.

Yet Mollino had been especially interested and worked mainly as an interior designer.

His furniture is intended to be part of a whole, playing a specific role within the space of an overall interior design.

Occasionally he also experimented with single pieces of furniture typically designed for exhibitions.

He never designed for companies nor were his pieces mass-produced.

He passed away in the early afternoon of 27 August 1973, while working in his studio.

Thanks to an extended apprenticeship with his civil engineer father before, during, and after studying architecture, Carlo Mollino was highly skilled in a range of building technologies and materials while commanding all aspects of the construction process (for example he produces working drawings for the doors and windows of most of his buildings).