MARMO 9 by Thetis srl

A RC H I T E C T U RE D E S I G N A RT

MARMO Annual Magazine Issue no. 9, 2020 May Editor in chief Paolo Carli Editor Costantino Paolicchi Deputy Editor Aldo Colonetti Editorial Coordinator Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo

EDITORIAL Paolo Carli

JENNY HOLZER. THE WHOLE TRUTH Edoardo Bonaspetti

Coordinator Manuela Della Ducata

Editorial Staff Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo, Nicola Gnesi Graphic Silvia Cucurnia, Thetis Editor Henraux SpA Printers Bandecchi & Vivaldi, Pontedera, Pisa Contributors Alessandra Baldini, Roberto Bernabò, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Aldo Colonetti, Alessia Delisi, Turan Duda, Valentina Lonati, Susanna Orlando, Costantino Paolicchi Translations Romina Bicicchi, Daniel Olmos Photographers Mimmo Capurso, Mauro Crespi, Nicola Gnesi, Angelo Margutti, Lorenzo Palmieri, Miro Zagnoli

Cover Nicola Gnesi

Registration no 3/2017 - 24/02/2017 of the “Registro stampa Tribunale di Lucca”

Valentina Lonati

ROSALDA GILARDI. SCULPTURE AS THE SENTIMENT OF THE WORLD Costantino Paolicchi

“Printed under the auspices of Henraux SpA”

LOW-KEY LUXURY

EXPO DUBAI 2021: ITALIAN PAVILION, INFINITE METAPHOR Aldo Colonetti

THE LONG ROAD TO MOUNT ALTISSIMO Costantino Paolicchi

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ADI DESIGN MUSEUM. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADE IN ITALY Aldo Colonetti

RENZO MAGGI. POETIC SCULPTOR Roberto Bernabò

THE SHAPE OF TASTE. A CONVERSATION WITH DAVIDE OLDANI AND ATTILA VERESS Alessia Delisi

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MATERIALITY, MEMORY, ART Turan Duda

ISAMU NOGUCHI, TAJAPIERE Alessandra Baldini

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BULLETIN

BY PAOLO CARLI PRESIDENT OF HENRAUX SPA AND HENRAUX FOUNDATION

This is an edition of Marmo that finds the light in a complicated moment, not only for the editorial staff that brought it to life together, along with the whole Henraux team, but for all of Italy. In fact, it was made in the midst of the lockdown imposed by the Covid19 pandemic, therefore through the means of “telecommuting” for many and with a strange physical distance that I would define, however, only apparent in the way that minds and hearts were actually closer than ever. Built through article after article, with a special professional, personal and emotional involvement – this year more so than in other years –, it intends to be a small but solid contribution to the rediscovered national pride that will be so precious in the complex months that await us, but which we hope will also be full of renewed enthusiasm and new projects. Right from the cover, we wanted the message to be loud with the choice of reproducing the tricolour flag with some of our Italian marble: Verde Alpi, Bianco Statuario Altissimo and Rosso Verona, securely supported by two dusty hands, firm and hardworking. The recovery from this difficult moment can only start from here: from the creativity and our know-how that are unique in the world. Without rhetoric, however, but only with the awareness of what Made in Italy is, and will have to go back to being: the base on which

to lean on to find the foothold to start again with a new impetus. Henraux is really lucky in this because it has strong foundations in its DNA, such as architecture, design and art. In this new issue of Marmo we showcase some excellent examples: in architecture, with the project of the Italian Pavilion at the Universal Exposition 2021 in Dubai, which between vision, nature and artifice, will not only be an exhibition venue, but also a representation of the best Italian talent; in design, with the presentation of the ADI Design Museum which, in addition to collecting the precious and unique Compasso D’oro collection, will be an international centre for all activities that revolve around design; in art, with the rediscovery of the figure of an artist who is very dear to Henraux: Rosalda Gilardi, often referred to as Henry Moore’s artistic heir and lastly, in food, with a design project created by chef Davide Oldani and by designer Attila Veress together with our brand Luce di Carrara. This edition also includes the section “The masters of Henraux” which collects insights and interviews with some of the great artists with whom the company has had the privilege of working: it starts with Renzo Maggi who, in an intense conversation with Roberto Bernabò draws his own portrait, full of culture and humanity. As always, and this year more than ever, I wish you a good read!

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Exhibition view: Tutta la Verità (The Whole Truth), GAMeC, Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2019. Ph. Nicola Gnesi

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JENNY HOLZER. THE WHOLE TRUTH BY EDOARDO BONASPETTI

The Henraux Foundation, partner of the project, was proud to produce nine marble benches for the exhibition at the GAMeC in Bergamo, held from 30 May to 1 September 2019. They are benches whose surfaces were engraved with phrases chosen by the artist, using the company’s workers and technology.

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Jenny Holzer, Altra gente, 2019 digital projection. Jenny Holzer, Dormo, 2019 bench in Versilys marble. Installation view, Tutta la Verità (The Whole Truth), GAMeC, Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2019. Ph. Lorenzo Palmieri

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Jenny Holzer, La gioia, 2019, bench in Versilys marble. Installation view, Tutta la Verità (The Whole Truth), GAMeC, Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2019. Ph. Lorenzo Palmieri

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Portfolio Exhibition view: Tutta la Verità (The Whole Truth), GAMeC, Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, 2019. Ph. Lorenzo Palmieri

“No need of words just you or rather us.” James Schuyler “Passivo come un uccello che vede tutto, volando, e si porta in cuore nel volo in cielo la coscienza che non perdona.” Pier Paolo Pasolini “Out of suffering power is born Out of power’ suffering is born.” Anna Ś� wirszczyńska

“Gente in fuga davanti ad altra gente.” Wislawa Szymborska These are some of the phrases engraved on the nine benches that make up the American artist’s installation for her personal exhibition “The Whole Truth.” They are thoughts and passages of poets and writers addressed to visitors who have taken the time to read them or even sit on them, and so they are regarded as a privileged space for a break or a moment of contemplation. The pieces were arranged in a circle in the penumbra of the Sala delle Capriate at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, a symbolic place where city justice was administered, were surrounded by glowing phrases projected on the large medieval walls, normally decorated with Renaissance frescoes. Whether they are conveyed through a bench, a projection or a poster, the strengths of words and the public

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Portfolio Jenny Holzer, With you, 2019, bench in Versilys marble. Courtesy Fondazione Henraux Ph. Nicola Gnesi

accessibility of her work are characteristic features of the artist’s research since the 1970s, Holzer has made language her instrument of emancipation and reflection, both individual and collective. The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, artistic director of the GAMeC of Bergamo, and produced in collaboration with the Henraux Foundation, intertwined ancient and contemporary visual productions, temporality and civil works. The phrases chosen by the artist touch on themes such as identity and gender, they stimulate reflections on integration and issues of belonging and exclusion. They open perspectives for individual and collective ethics that make us confront our fragility

and contradictions. The first useful exercise in approaching the work of the American artist is to try to look at yourself with different eyes and ask yourself about the nature of our contradictions, perhaps immersing ourselves in unexplored territories. It is good to recalibrate around the new paradigms and models that current scenarios impose on us. The great migrations due to climate change, the collapse of entire ecosystems, the economies in crisis, our weaknesses and iniquities are manifestations of a world that is changing and confronting us with challenges and choices that are up to the individual, both as a subject and as part of a community.

Design

LOW-KEY LUXURY

BY VALENTINA LONATI

Left, Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet at AD Intérieurs 2019

In collaboration with Luce di Carrara, the Monegasque studio Humbert & Poyet has designed a bathroom with a neoclassical touch, for the occasion of AD Intérieurs, a yearly event organized by AD France. They have cemented their concept of discreet luxury with spaces conceived with grace and refinement, something that has been achieved perfectly with this project.

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Above and right, shower in brass and Verde Alpi marble and bathtub in Verde Alpi marble, design Humbert & Poyet

Every process of metamorphosis presupposes fluidity, whether it is material or conceptual. Imagine a dance from a ‘before’ to an ‘after’, which in the specific case of design is expressed through elements that carry the concept of transformism. In September 2019, AD Intérieurs (the event organized every year by Architectural Digest France on the occasion of Maison & Objet and Paris Design Week), celebrated its tenth edition with an exhibition set up within the Hôtel de Coulanges in Paris, dedicated precisely to the theme of metamorphosis. An almost prophetic theme, if observed with today’s eyes. To be precise, thirteen architects and designers were asked to interpret the imagery linked to the transition, through the design of environments capable of

narrating the encounter - in its highest form - between design and craftsmanship. Among the participants in the exhibition was the duo Humbert & Poyet, formed by the architects Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet. Their partnership was born in 2008 between Montecarlo and Paris and has given life over the years to something they call “Low-key luxury architecture”. Spaces designed with care and elegance, interpreters of a whispered luxury, conceived for everyday life. With an ambition: to evoke moods, thoughts and ideas. “During the development of our projects, the discussion always revolves around the application of an idea. The way we complement each other is at the basis of everything we do, and it ensures that we create a space exactly as we had imagined

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Bathtub in Verde Alpi marble, design Humbert & Poyet

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Uniting their projects is a constant dialogue between sinuosity and rigour, between maximalism and minimalism, this gives rise to a contained, almost discreet opulence, which is manifested in the calibrated choice of the colour palette gold, bronze, pastels, black - and materials - brass, wood, stone.

Right, sink in Bianco Macchietta marble, design Humbert & Poyet

it”, explains Christophe Poyet. In their Monegasque studio or in the Parisian office, Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet design with a light stroke private interiors, shops, hotels and restaurants all over the world. Uniting their projects is a constant dialogue between sinuosity and rigour, between maximalism and minimalism, this gives rise to a contained, almost discreet opulence, which is manifested in the calibrated choice of the colour palette - gold, bronze, pastels, black - and materials - brass, wood, stone. The main inspiration is always the French Art Deco, to which are added references to the great designers and architects of the twentieth century, to Le Corbusier, to the Bauhaus, to Giò Ponti. The concept of time, in their interiors, is evanescent: epochs and historical references merge, creating eclectic, whimsical settings that are in all cases, however, balanced. The same approach was adopted for the AD Intérieurs exhibition: here, Humbert & Poyet have brought the idea of metamorphosis to life through a bathroom with neoclassical accents, inspired by the architecture of the Palladian villas but immersed in a suspended dimension. The dichotomy between the austerity of the geometries and the roundness of the lines materializes in the two central elements of the space they designed: the sculptural bathtub made from a large block of Verde Alpi marble, by Luce di Carrara, and the shower worked like a bronze cage, erected on its marble base. If the former imposes itself with full volumes and the intense tone of the veins, the latter almost seems to take flight by twisting on itself. They

are two almost theatrical scenic elements, the maximum expression of the French duo’s aesthetics. At the origin of both, the metamorphic process from which marble flows: the transformation of sedimentary rocks, the recrystallization of calcium carbonate, the formation of crystalline calcite. We thus return to the fil rouge of the exhibition: the metamorphosis, represented perfectly by marble. And we go further: in the hands of Humbert & Poyet, stone becomes a docile and malleable matter, contributing to the definition of a metaphysical yet dense, real place. A stage awaiting the start of the show. To reinforce the idea of symmetry, something that was central in the structure of the Palladian villas, are the archshaped niches in which the velvet-covered benches and the freestanding sink in Statuario Altissimo marble, also by Luce di Carrara, were set in a tribute to the shapes of neoclassical fountains. It is pure and compact marble, with limited production. In the design of the space, the reference to Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical painting is evident: Humbert & Poyet play with the scale, the proportions and the classic references to draw a scenography on the edge of reality. Again, everything merges and gets confused. “Our goal is to translate a complex atmosphere into a three-dimensional space”, they say. A three-dimensionality that seems to transcend reality to land in the universe of imagination, where the materiality of the elements - marble, bronze, velvet - loses consistency becoming, as was mentioned previously, fluid.

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ROSALDA GILARDI.

SCULPTURE AS THE SENTIMENT OF THE WORLD BY COSTANTINO PAOLICCHI

A portrait of the sculptor, Rosalda Gilardi, who, in coming to Henraux for the completion of a work, found a place where she could satisfy her expressive needs in Versilia, such as a natural inclination for monumental sculpture and the ability to extract the shape of her inner world from stone.

Right, Rosalda Gilardi, Presenze, 1967 ca., serpentino, h. 197 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Henraux

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Rosalda Gilardi, Vegetale, 1969, Portuguese pink marble. Courtesy Documentart Museo dei Bozzetti, Pietrasanta

When I first met the sculptor Rosalda Gilardi in 1973, I was only twenty-five years old and she was still a beautiful woman with large, expressive eyes. We discovered we were neighbours in fortuitous circumstances: a stream that flowed nearby, the Rio Bonazzera broke its banks, following intense rains which had flooded the surrounding countryside. And so on a grey morning, we met with the locals to assess the damage and to vent our anger towards public bodies and their consortia, guilty of decades of neglect. A few centimetres of slime had deposited in the large garden of her villa, leaving the rooms on the ground floor dirty. While she

despondently showed me that disaster, I had an opportunity to observe many largeformat sculptures in the grounds, whose beauty remained unperturbed by the mud and instead seemed to take on a new value, as if to affirm the absolute dominion of those works both on that place and on the world. We became friends. I often went to visit her in her studio to see recent works and above all to speak with her, because I realized how much experience she possessed and to feel the intensity of her thoughts and emotions. She told me about her sculptural studies at the Turin Academy, about her first exhibitions in Italy, about her life in Locarno. She told

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Rosalda Gilardi, Ipotesi vegetale, 1986. Courtesy Documentart Museo dei Bozzetti, Pietrasanta

me about the many group shows she had participated in Lucerne, Zurich and other Swiss cities and about her solo shows at the Moutier and Neuchätel Museums. In 1962 she was invited to the Carrara Biennial, there she met and visited many of the most important masters of contemporary sculpture at Henraux, who Erminio Cidonio, the company’s sole administrator, had involved in his prestigious museum project with the artistic direction of critic and art historian Giuseppe Marchiori. When she arrived in Querceta in 1966 to create one of her works at the Henraux factories, following in the footsteps of other artists, she was taken

by Versilia’s timeless landscape, which rises up from the sea to the high marble mountains. While maintaining close relations with Locarno, she chose to settle in a beautiful house-studio built in 1967 in the countryside around Querceta. Here she could work in a serene environment, tailored just for her, she could take advantage of the skills of many talented craftsmen and have fruitful relationships with internationally renowned sculptors: with Henry Moore, for example, to whom she was linked through a devoted friendship, with Branco Ruzic, with Maria Papa, with Alicia Penalba, with Pietro Cascella and with Francǫis Stahly who

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Rosalda Gilardi at work. Courtesy Fondazione Henraux

had trained in Zurich, in the halls of the Bauhaus. She exhibited her works in 1967 at the Salon de Mai in Paris and participated in several editions of the Quadrennial in Rome and Turin, the Permanente in Milan and the International Biennial of the Bronzetto in Padua. In 1968 she held a solo exhibition at the Civic Museum of Pistoia, and the following year at the Museum of Modern Art of Castellanza. In 1972 she exhibited at the Venice Biennale where Peggy Guggenheim purchased a sculpture of hers, intended for the Guggenheim Museum. In that same year, she attended with a piece, the extensive review of the Henraux collection at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In 1974 she embarked on a four-month study and work trip to Latin America, visiting Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru. She stopped in the ancient capital of the Inca empire, Cuzco, the navel of the world. In Calle Hatun Rumiyd the “twelveangled stone” was revealed to her as an imposing and mysterious granite sculpture. She then explored all the sacred sites in the valley of the Huatanay river, which was

indicated by the sun god to the Inca people over 3,000 years ago at the origins of their history. It was the fantastic architectures of the fortress of Sacsayhuamán that impressed her particularly, with those large, artfully polished stones, set against one another, overlapping each other with incredible precision to form cyclopean walls, which had resisted both the ravages of time and the Spanish conquistadors. She climbed up to the “Old Mountain”, Machu Picchu, touching the sky at over two thousand meters in altitude: where everything can be conceived as a work of art, created in the very bosom of nature, in the form of the lost city, the small secret city of the emperors. Rosalda did not make that long journey in the same way as the many tourists who flock to the Inca ruins every year: she had gone in search of herself, to decipher the reasons for that relationship with stone which had become an unavoidable need to translate her visions into monumental forms, a need that had been stirring in her since her youth at the academy. Returning from this experience, she brought home a diary and a series of

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splendid drawings, some collected in a lithographic folder presented by Mario De Micheli, others published in a refined edition, a copy of which I received as a gift. They were drawings in which Rosalda showed a confident, elegant trait, capable of evoking the light and shapes of those ancient stones. An eclectic woman of vast and profound culture, Rosalda highlighted the love that now bounded her in tight knots to Versilia, to the microcosm of pain and poetry of the quarries and quarrymen and led to her organizing and setting up a splendid retrospective exhibition of the

Rosalda possessed by natural inclination, almost a chromosomal derivation that owed nothing to genetics but which showed an affinity of perception of the forms of nature, an identity of interest and love, of sensitivity and intuition, typical of someone who, like Moore, is “... accustomed to carving stone and wood, or modelling the ideal image of one’s poetic cosmos from a mound of clay.”2 It was an affinity that was also found in the ways of making sculpture because Rosalda worked as Moore, and Moore, as Giuseppe Marchiori noted: “... is one of

painter Giuseppe Viner at the Gallery of Modern Art of Forte dei Marmi in 1975.1 Perhaps this vocation for the monumental abstract benefitted her relationship with Henry Moore, and indeed Gilardi was favoured by many as the artist destined to succeed him, the one who would welcome her artistic and spiritual heritage. In reality, it was not a legacy, but an instinctual predisposition to the monumental that

those who works hard in life, chiseling, hammering and cutting: it’s enough to see him in the marble quarries, in the workshops, in the marble factory, close to the workers, always on the move, careful and a good judge of their work; expert as he is in the trade....”3 Rosalda left us an affectionate memory of the English sculptor: “My meeting with Moore was immediately dictated

Perhaps her vocation to the monumental abstract favoured her relationship with Henry Moore and Gilardi was indicated as the artist destined to succeed him by many, the one who would welcome her artistic and spiritual heritage.

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by a lot of cordiality, which later became friendship. I immediately admired the artist and his work, and whilst gradually getting to know him, I appreciated the man with his profound qualities of sensitivity and humanity.” The sculptress received him many times at her studio in Forte dei Marmi, and after many years she remembered how Moore managed to discover infinite images in front of the trunk of an old “dried up and twisted” tree. “He knew how to read nature like no other and he was able to draw from it those miraculous ideas that then transformed into his splendid sculptures and drawings. On one occasion he said to me: ‘The trees of Forte are the most expressive in the world; these trees also helped to keep me in Versilia’.”4 He dreamed of exhibiting all of his work at the Forte Belvedere in Florence. He expressed the wish one day when he was with Giancarlo Citi and Rosalda Gilardi at the foot of Mt Altissimo, at the Henraux house near the Polla. He wanted to gauge his sculptures through the beauty and

grandeur of Florence’s monuments. He attained that dream a few years later, in 1972. Of his intense and so involving relationship with Versilia, the quarries, the marble men, the sensitive craftsmen “translators” of his works, the highest, most exciting, most intense moment of symbolic and evocative meanings, it was undoubtedly this which saw him gauge himself with the terrible grandeur of Michelangelo’s mountain: Mt Altissimo. Among the many critics who have dealt with Rosalda’s work, I believe – without wishing to disrespect the others – that Giuseppe Marchiori is the one who, more than any other had sensed the authentic vocation to the monumental of this sculptor whose encounter with marble “... had been informed from one with Baveno granite: a hard stone of a ferrous or rosy color, good for closing the shapes with clear profiles in monumental structures. Hers is an authentic vocation towards the conquest of a severe, lean style, freed from any superstructure that alters its essential design.”5

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Marchiori closely followed Rosalda’s work in the Henraux studios. He observed her while she attacked marble and stone with the determination and confidence of those who, with their minds and hands, practice a centuries-old trade. Her works showed the results of a long path of research and experimentation: “Today the measure has become exact” – he wrote in 1966 – “due to the maturity of her vision, built up from many experiences and a lot of work, carried out from place to place, during some particularly intense, almost feverish years. It was a matter of finding the right relationship between image and space: a difficult relationship, both internally and externally. When this relationship is missing, the sculpture does not hold, it becomes just another object. Rosalda found the true dimension by working outdoors, in nature, near the mountains from which the marble and granite are quarried. The environment suggests this relationship to her, forcing her, if you will, to ‘see’ in a free way, without cultural constraints which are too strict.”6

Marchiori emphasised Rosalda’s “complete spiritual freedom”, her ability to look at reality and interpret it, to establish close relationships with the natural environment and with man-made spaces, with a landscape architecture transformed by human work: the quarry, with its geometries of light that expand over wide horizons and the Tuscan countryside with the orderly rows of cypresses and the scores of the vineyards like the handwriting of the earth. For this reason, in her works “… the planes are beaten, chipped at irregular points, or with parallel grooves, to better highlight the values of the material, through the rustic modeling and the architectural scheme of the sculpture.”7 Even her way of making sculpture fascinated the critic, it was so similar to that of the greatest sculptors of all time, because Rosalda did not spare herself, the physical effort needed to work directly on the material was an essential component of the act of creation for her, with the same dignity of intuition and idea of design:

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Art Rosalda always rejected her virtuosity to seek, independently and with great effort, a “dignity” of style, a language that would allow her to translate the richness of her inner world into the forms of sculpture.

“Did Rosalda, who beats the marble or granite, exercising the strength of her muscles, perhaps learn from her master Baglioni a ‘job’ as a life-sentenced? (...) To all the questions we ask, the answer comes from those who believe in their work, from those who commit themselves to the end, in that struggle, it is not with rhetoric, but truth, that the artist resolves with different outcomes, when faced with the eternal problem of choice and action.”8 Her teacher at the Albertina Academy in Turin was Umberto Baglioni from Calabria, who gave his students complete freedom to express themselves on the basis of a solid craft, but without virtuosity, without the technicality of the executors, which represses creativity and poetry. Rosalda always rejected her virtuosity to seek, independently and with great effort, a “dignity” of style, a language that would allow her to translate the richness of her inner world into the forms of sculpture. “Let’s say right away” – declared Marchiori – “that her most authentic vocation is for monumental sculpture. And that her method is what Michelangelo called ‘by way of removing’. It is the slow or impetuous method of those who know how to work marble, freeing a shape, chip by chip, from the block that contains it and creating something, especially without

Left, Rosalda Gilardi, Presenze, Guggenheim Collection, Venezia Ph. Nicola Gnesi

a model.” During an interview with Bruna Corradini, Rosalda confided: “The sculpture is already present in my mind and I just need to implement it concretely... When sculpture is born in my mind, it is already both form and substance.” In 1970, in Genoa, Marchiori returned to reflect on Rosalda’s work which seemed to be projected towards new structures and new creative dimensions during a particularly happy moment for the artist: “To the marbles and monumental stones” – he noted – “adorned with a sober design (sober so much as to border on austerity), and which symbolically represent ideal ‘presences’ in a space of meditation and silence, Rosalda opposed, in a more direct relationship with the spirit of the time, the magic of geometric order, the metaphysical charm of sculptures that can be recomposed, from time to time, in different and, in every case, absolute forms.”9 It is the cubes, the cylinders, the spheres, the strange modular architecture of “Incontri”, in black and white marble, symbolic images of the eternal struggle of reason against the chaos that always threatens to obscure it. They are “... the real monuments of our history without heroes.”

N OT E S 1 Giuseppe Viner, Catalog of the retrospective exhibition on the centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Viner, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art of Forte dei Marmi, July-August 1975. Introduction by Mario De Micheli, critical text by Rosalda Gilardi. Curators: Antonio Bernieri, Mario De Micheli, Rosalda Gilardi, Marcello Polacci. 2 G. Marchiori, Pages of Diary (19691970), in “Marmo 5”, Rebellato Ed., Padova 1971, pp. 168-186. “Querceta, May 1970”, p. 171. 3 Ibidem, p. 173. 4 Testimony of Rosalda Gilardi in Henry Moore a Forte dei Marmi e in Versilia. L’uomo, l’artista., Giardini Ed., Pisa 1988, pp. 69-73. 5 G. Marchiori, Pages of Diary (19661970), cit., pp. 128-158, “Querceta, summer 1966”, p. 129. 6 Ibidem, “Querceta, estate 1966”, p. 132. 7 Ibidem, p. 137. 8 Ivi. 9 Ibidem, “Genova, May 1970”, p. 155 and following.

Architecture

EXPO DUBAI 2021: ITALIAN PAVILION, INFINITE METAPHOR BY ALDO COLONETTI

Italy will be present at the 2021 world expo “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”, with a project by Italo Rota and Carlo Ratti, accompanied by F&M Ingegneria and Matteo Gatto & Associati. The pavilion will not only be an exhibition venue, but also a representation of the best Italian talents. Across vision, nature and artifice.

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Right, Expo Dubai 2021, Padiglione Italia, render

The major exhibition events represent an extraordinary workshop for all of the disciplines that contribute to the creation of spaces and architectures destined to live for a certain period of time, and perhaps for this very reason, they constitute unique and unrepeatable design models. This is exactly what happened with the Milan EXPO 2015, dedicated to “Feeding the planet, energy for life”. This year in Dubai, from 1 October 2021 to 31 March 2022 (the event has been moved a year due to the pandemic), the Expo will be dedicated to “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”, and the Italian pavilion will have a title, “Beauty unites people”, which already in itself is a kind of autobiography of our country. It is a theme which at first seems easy, based on our artistic and cultural traditions, even if in the case of an event designed for tens of millions of people from different cultures, the difficulty is in the ability to make a series spectacular and “physically visitable”. In concepts and keywords that must be transformed into an architecture, capable of speaking immediately and without intellectualistic mediation. The international design competition for

the Italian pavilion saw the involvement of nineteen initial proposals and ended with a winner comprised of a temporary grouping of companies formed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota Building Office, F&M Ingegneria, Matteo Gatto&Associati. Davide Rampello and his studio collaborated on defining the contents. The result is an unexpected architecture that has a series of cultural references, in particular, Archigram’s Walking City from the 1960s with “the theme of intelligent buildings”, as Ratti himself points out. 3500 square meters, 25 meters high, wrapped in a transparent film, it is an architectural structure that is the result of a vivid imagination that is not only poetic, “whose coverage, consisting of two hulls of 40 meters and one of 60, made and donated by Fincantieri, left Italy to reach Dubai by sea. Once they arrive, the hulls will be overturned and used as the roof of the pavilion”, explains Italo Rota. From above but also from a facing view, the three hulls will have the appearance of three petals constituting the colours of the Italian flag; as is explained by Paolo Glisenti, General Commissioner of Italy

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for Expo 2021 Dubai: “The project allows us to create a space not only for exhibition but above all it is representative of the best Italian talent, offering visitors a unique aesthetic experience, demonstrating to the world skills, multidisciplinary talents and qualities which in turn could become promoters of new training, professional and entrepreneurial opportunities.” Italo Rota is most definitely a visionary architect, giving words and suggestions a corresponding representation, even to the most abstract and “poetic”, whilst using all the symbolic passages that design

languages allow today. Here, as in his other works, the reference to history and context, as to the expressive repertoire of the applied arts, represents a perimeter in which infinite meanings are condensed, which is then up to us to recognise. Its architecture is the result of an endless, unlimited semiosis, full of references and open relationships: “In this architecture, the boats also recall the journeys of the Phoenicians and Romans who, crossing the Mediterranean, favoured an exchange between peoples. The working group project has succeeded on many fronts; the

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Above and right, Expo Dubai 2021, Italy Pavilion, render

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Expo Dubai 2021, Italy Pavilion, render

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The materials used, in addition to steel which is an easily recyclable component, refer to new experiments such as derivatives of coffee, oranges, hemp and mycelium, an organic compound based on stabilized mushrooms, that come from nature to then return to nature.

overturned hull, for example, was used by ancient navigators as their first shelter when they reached a new land. But also the ‘nave’ (ship) understood as a word is the root of the word ‘navata’, the place where people meet and recognize each other through common thoughts.” In fact, in sacred architecture, the different shapes of the naves identify ritual, space and relationships. Away from the spotlight, the reference to the circular economy is central. Enter the role and skills of a designer like Carlo Ratti, with respect to the theme of the relationship between nature and artifice, which is the basis of his research as director of the Senseable City Lab in Boston’s MIT. “Rota and I have always

found each other in design, even if starting from apparently different points of view, in the relationship between natural and artificial. For us, the results are not immutable buildings; we, the interpreters, give them life and transform them, even physically. We are far from formalism and stylistic obsession.” First of all, the materials used, in addition to steel which is an easily recyclable component, refer to new experiments such as derivatives of coffee, oranges, hemp and mycelium, an organic compound based on stabilized mushrooms, that come from nature to then return to nature. Secondly, moving within this space, in which each step corresponds to an unpredictable point of view, a sort of

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Above and right. Expo Dubai 2021, Italy Pavilion, render

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It will be a unique experience to visit the Italian pavilion of Dubai Expo because it will ask all of us to not only assume a simple role as a curious and attentive guest; its meaning will be completed, day after day, through subjective relationships with a space that only superficially belongs to the architects.

“around the corner” that is always new and original, means putting the person at the centre of the experience, intended as a sentient subject that transforms and shapes space in their image and likeness. “Space is an extension of the human mind that follows the body in its movement. Nothing is fixed and the big question, for us architects, concerns the way in which architecture can be set in motion. The goal for the next few years will be to design walking cities”, says Rota. It will be a unique experience to visit the Italian pavilion of Dubai Expo because

it will ask all of us to not only assume a simple role as a curious and attentive guest; its meaning will be completed, day after day, through subjective relationships with a space that only superficially belongs to the architects. It is an open work that, undoubtedly, Umberto Eco would have liked for its labyrinthine system of composition; it is an architecture suspended between thought and reality, between the most advanced technologies and materials in the world and the subtle border of a poetic composition that is always an infinite metaphor.

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THE LONG ROAD TO MOUNT ALTISSIMO BY COSTANTINO PAOLICCHI PHOTO NICOLA GNESI

Using a wealth of data and meticulous study of the author reconstructs the events that led to Altissimo quarries, by Marco Borrini. A historical moment that, in only a few years, and cultural development of a territory devoid

the existing documentation, the activation of the Mount made possible the economic of other resources.

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The peak of Monte Altissimo, Versilia, The Tyrrhenian sea and Corsica in the background

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After Michelangelo’s brief experience (1518-1520) and the start of the excavations at Altissimo requested by Cosimo I Medici in 1568, the mining activities gradually became weaker during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1740 the various excavations on Mount Altissimo stopped completely.

Right, Tacca Bianca Quarry

Two hundred years ago, in 1820, Marco Borrini purchased the southern part of Mount Altissimo and an era of great progress beckoned for Versilia. The marble industry was about to be born, which would allow the flourishing of activities and businesses throughout the area, the development of factories, workshops, sculpture studios. It would favour employment and the emergence of new technical and entrepreneurial professionalism. In the following year, the Borrini-Henraux Company was formed, and since 1821, carrying the name “Henraux” a leading company in the stone sector has arrived at the present day and is known and appreciated all over the world. The grand-ducal license on the quarries of the Capitanato di Pietrasanta, following the donation of the agri-marmiferous deliberated by the Communities of Seravezza and Cappella on May 18, 1515, in favour of the Lordship of Florence, had prevented, or at the very least limited the expansion of the industry and of the marble trade via free initiative. After Michelangelo’s brief experience (1518-1520) and the start of the excavations at Altissimo requested by Cosimo I Medici in 1568, the mining activities gradually became weaker during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1740 the various excavations on Mount Altissimo stopped completely. We find notice of Altissimo’s marble deposits in the Analysis of Count Francesco Campana, previously mentioned several times: “On Mount Altissimo in a place called Vincarella and the Costa dei Cani, there is statuary marble. [...] These quarries – he wrote in around 1767 – [...] they were left in abandonment because the unhappy situation of the same made working too expensive. In fact about 25 years ago on the occasion of the aforementioned ruined Polvaccio di Carrara quarry, seizing this opportunity some Seravezza merchants once again opened the said statuary quarries, spent a lot but soon abandoned them.”1 Campana, among other things, had hoped to increase the excavation by changing the system of licensing to encourage the manufacture and trade of marble and also to introduce the statuary. In his Reports, published in 1773, Targioni Tozzetti also complained of the state of abandonment of the Altissimo quarries: “It was certainly a great embarrassment for us Tuscans, who had never thought about effectively opening the Statuary Marble Quarry of Altissimo; as from the time of the Grand Duke Cosimo until the present day, many thousands of pieces of Carrara marble have been brought to the Grand Ducal State, which imports a Treasure, which could circulate in the hands of our Consudditi, in addition to many thousands of pieces, which if they could have sent them out of the state, as they do all day in Carrara.”2 Targioni quoted a letter of 26 January 1744, addressed to him from Francesco Antonio Fortini, written when Fortini, a dealer from Seravezza, asked the Grand Duke for the license for the excavation of marble on Altissimo: “Mount Altissimo is filled with marble in all parts, enough of which there is to excavate until Judgement day, even if hundreds of people worked there: rather as more people worked there, there would be even more and more to remove from the Marble, because the white is not like the mixed marble, which are on the surface, and with depth the vein is lost, but the white the more one is inside, the more the vein grows.”3 The nineteenth century was preparing “… more propitious times [...] for industrial enterprises – observed Repetti – and one of the many that through more-or-less luck, took place in Tuscany was the reactivation of the statuary marble quarries on M. Altissimo. It was in 1820, when the cavalier Marco Borrini, hot with love for his country, on the basis of the historical events mentioned above, tried to restore that forgotten stone. That this zealous citizen succeeded, is declared in the favorable report of 19 October 1820 made to the grand-ducal government by the famous Giovanni Fabroni who was

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commissioned to go to M. Altissimo to examine and report on the Borrini enterprise; so as a consequence of that relationship, the courageous entrepreneur was provided by R. Depositerìa with various encouragements for the work started, to which neither the difficulty of the locations, nor the excavations made three centuries earlier, nor the ancient credit and competition of the neighbor Carrara were able to slow down or interrupt the difficult undertaking. So the consistency of Cav. Borrini has reached this goal that has discovered in the flanks of Mount Altissimo the most pure, pasty and at the same time the most solid marble that the artists have ever had under the chisel. [...] However, among the quarries of M. Altissimo, those of Falcovaja give perhaps the finest and purest marble of all of the ancient and modern statuary so far excavated. They enter the ranks of the new quarries of statuary currently activated in Mount Altissimo, to the east those of the southern flank placed above the Falcovaja canal between the Vasajone which approaches it to the west and the quarries of the Polla and the channel called della Vincarella located at its east. A single carriageway leads to the foot of the mountain, and ends in a piazza, where the marble is brought down by the three canals, Polla, Falcovaja and Vincarella, marble that are then loaded to transport them to the marina no more than seven miles away.”4 With the reintegration of the absolute power of the old regimes, following the fall of Napoleon and the end of French dominion in Italy, the territory of the Vicariate of Pietrasanta was again assigned to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the following years there was a serious food shortage; and so to create jobs and help

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Large plots of “marble” and pasture land remained available, and the Grand Ducal allowed the Community of Seravezza to sell them to private individuals who had requested it with prior Grand Ducal authorization. Amongst the first to take advantage of this favorable opportunity was dr. Marco Borrini.

the destitute, the Grand Duke Ferdinando III approved the financing of the restoration of the Via di Marina up to Stazzema and the reconstruction of the Ponte di Tavole in 1816. Following these hard times, the marble industry also rejuvenated, since the restored European political situation appeared favorable to a recovery of exportation. In order to encourage marble excavations, it became necessary to verify the situation of public properties, concessions and any illegitimate occupations in the marble areas. In 1820 the Community of Seravezza arranged careful checks through the community magistrate; various leasings had been carried out towards the end of the eighteenth century, but there were many usurpers, that is, those who had carried out mining activities in the quarries owned by the Grand Ducal without paying any fees or taxes. The Grand Ducal authorized the Seravezza Community to establish a method to remedy those abuses, which were condoned by means of a regular purchase deed. Large plots of “marble” and pasture land remained available, and the Grand Ducal allowed the Community of Seravezza to sell them to private individuals who had requested it with prior Grand Ducal authorization. Amongst the first to take advantage of this favorable opportunity was dr. Marco Borrini, long resident in Seravezza but from an ancient and wealthy family of Ligurian origins. He held several public offices, including that of Gonfalonier from 1832 to 1837. Well ensconced within the Grand Ducal Court, he obtained important honors and in particular, in 1836, the Decoration of Merit for a First-class industrialist, as “promoter of the excavation of Mount Altissimo marble”.

Mossa Quarry and Vincarella, The location of Michelangelo’s visit. Left, Cervaiole Quarry

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On June 12, 1820, Marco Borrini purchased the whole southern part of Mount Altissimo from the Community of Seravezza, with a contract signed by the notary Candido of the late Luca Baschieri di Fucecchio, Community Chancellor of Pietrasanta and Public Notary residing in Pietrasanta, in the presence of witnesses and in execution of the rescripted Sovereign of April 30, 1820.

Borrini was aware of the mineral wealth that could be extracted from that mountain which Michelangelo had explored around 1518 and where Cosimo I Medici started the excavation of statuary marble in 1568. The Community of Seravezza agreed to sell Marco Borrini, a “plot of stripped and rocky land on Mount Altissimo”, with its resolution of February 28, 1820, of bushel 275 and 8/10 for 275,16,00 Lira plus an increase of 10% to avoid subasta: in all 303,07,08 Lira.5 The body of the resolution indicates the boundaries of the plot offered for sale, based on the report of municipal expert Carlo Polini: “With regards to the report of their community expert on 10 January, from which it is noted that the plot sloping towards the river, and bordered in Levante with the Costa dei Cani, Don Stefano Salini, and Strada, in the South with the Altissimo River and Piscinacchio, in Ponente with the Bosco Comunale of Col di Monte and Borra della Greppia, in Tramontana with the summit and ridge of the mountain, the quantity is increased to two hundred and seventy-five and eight tenths, and being quite bare soil and incapable of any product, with the exception of a little hay, the estimate is raised to two hundred and seventy-five and sixteen lira.” It included the entire southern slope of Mount Altissimo, where the quarries opened by the Borrini-Henraux Company remain, those subsequently opened and cultivated by the Mount Altissimo Company, and those subsequently opened and cultivated by Henraux up to the current company administration, as shown by the “Demonstration plants” existing in the Henraux archive, including the plan (copy of the original attached to the sales contract) created by the expert Polini on April 23, 1819 and authenticated by the same on May 29, 1869.6 On March 2, 1820, the Community Chancellery of Pietrasanta published a notice of release of the previously mentioned assets to Borrini.7 On April 30, 1820 the Grand Duke approved that sale. The sovereign approval was communicated to the Community Chancellor of Pietrasanta by letter from the Director of the I. and R. Office of the Fossi of Pisa of May 4, 1820, which ordered to immediately deposit the sale price in Monte Pio “… according to the orders.”8 On June 12, 1820, Marco Borrini purchased the whole southern part of Mount Altissimo from the Community of Seravezza, with a contract signed by the notary Candido of the late Luca Baschieri di Fucecchio, Community Chancellor of Pietrasanta and Public Notary residing in Pietrasanta, in the presence of witnesses and in execution of the rescripted Sovereign of April 30, 1820. Ranieri Barbacciani Fedeli expressed great appreciation for Marco Borrini’s initiative in the reopening of the Mount Altissimo quarries: “The sculpture at the rise of the immortal Canova has been renovated – he wrote – and the use of marble for public and private works has increased, it seemed to Cav. Marco Borrini that the favorable moment has come to reopen those quarries. It was therefore, speculative courage for

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him, for him a very warm love for the fine arts and the commitment to resume the excavation of marble was reserved, however he deemed it too great for the strength of a private citizen. Finally, after a long and costly effort, overcoming the obstacles that malignant people brought to his endeavor, he courageously continued his work, and triumphed over his enemies, thanks to the powerful support of the I. and R. Tuscan Government, which, in order to favor every way of national industry, also granted a customs duty to Seravezza marble. As part of the project and in a determined intention to re-enter the ancient speculations, Cav. Borrini bought a stretch of about 2000 staia (area of land required to sow a bushel of grain) of Mount Altissimo from the Apennine Municipality, and until July 1821 he applied his soul to resurrecting a new road on the ruins of the old, and after two years of efforts, and enormous expense, he came to open a rock of beautiful statuary marble within the eastern side of the mountain, and with experiments assured himself that the mine of this carbonate extended for almost all his land. Then it was that he returned to address his precepts to I. and R. Government, in order to assist him in the continuation of the work undertaken, from which immense advantages would result for the State. The Tuscan government welcomed requests of Cav. Borrini, subject to the information taken by the Court of Pietrasanta, which I presided over, and committed Mr. Giovanni Fabbroni, Director of the R. Zecca and Commissioner of State mines to verify the quarries, and the quality of the marble. (...). Mr. Fabbroni was able to take a good look at all the physical construction, and reported with particular love and interest to the I. and R. our Government , for the arts, this copious mountain of a noble statuary marble, is most valuable...”9 The condition of the road that Cosimo I Medici constructed in 1567 to the foot of the mountain along the Serra valley, appeared very bad, so much so in fact, that in some places there were landslides or severely damaged sections. The restoration required considerable funding which Borrini hastened to request from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, trusting in his good relations with the government bureaucracy. Following this request, the Grand Duke entrusted the task of instructing the practice to the Curate Regio in Pietrasanta, who at the time was Ranieri Barbacciani Fedeli and then subsequently to Giovanni Fabbroni. Giovanni Fabbroni, Director of the R. Mint and Commissioner of the mines of the State, former Superintendent of Bridges and Roads in Mount Bianco, in the Department of Montenotte and that of Genoa, had been appointed with dispatch from the Royal Secretariat of Finance of 22 September 1820 to carry out an inspection of the quarries of Mount Altissimo that Marco Borrini intended to reopen, and the marble road which was to be restored with the contribution of the Grand Ducal government. The report was addressed to Commendator Leonardo Frullani, Councilor of State and Director of R.R. Finance. According to Fabbroni, the Mount Altissimo company was destined for a sure success. The reservoir, almost inexhaustible, was also located in a favorable position for the

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Mt. Altissimo seen from Versilia

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Left, Cervaiole Quarry

solution of a problem common to all places with extended excavations: that of the debris dump. A house had to be built “for warehousing and the hospitalization of workers”, therefore “a road to lower the marble; a road the French call d’Exploitation”. This was besides, of course, the restoring and improving of the access road to the quarries, which Fabbroni was able to visit. The favorable opinions Fabbroni expressed in his report were decisive for the granting of the contribution requested by Marco Borrini to the Grand-ducal government for the restoration of the road of Altissimo. The latter went to inspect Altissimo and brought Jean Baptiste Alexandre Henraux with him, “Royal Superintendent for the choice and purchase of white and statuary marble from Carrara for public monuments in France”, according to the definition by Fabbroni himself who wished him at his side as an expert, together with a quarry foreman and two English sculptors. In the report of this inspection, which bears the date of October 19, 1820,10 Fabbroni remarked that he had “... profited from the presence Mr. Henraux’s foreman, who, from his own curiosity, went to try, with the help of guides and ropes, a large part of that face of the Mountain, bringing forth examples; and concluded with me, that everything is formed from the same beautiful statuary, under a blackish and torn crust covering it...” Fabbroni wrote that they were all surprised, including Henraux. The results of that survey were entirely favorable to the company, so much so that Fabbroni did not hide his enthusiasm: “It appears to be true that the Marble of Mount Altissimo, having no greater transport and no duty, will win in economy, in solidity and in more natural candor than that of the current Carrara quarries; will attract universal commissions; the artists now established in Carrara will be tempted to form their studios in Seravezza, as Mr. Henraux; and Seravezza will become the emporium of matter for public monuments, which will be desired by all nations; Seravezza will thus take over from Carrara; its marble will be converted into gold; and a new branch of commerce will open to further facilitate Tuscany, adding to the present national wealth...” The favorable opinion expressed by Fabbroni in his report was decisive for the granting of the contribution requested by Marco Borrini to the Grand Ducal Government for the restoration of the road on Altissimo. In total, Borrini obtained an allocation of 24,000 lire from the government, a very substantial sum for the time, of which 10,000 comprised a non-refundable contribution and 14,000 an interest-earning loan. There is no doubt that the commitment made by Borrini for the reconstruction of the road constituted the true purchase price of the Altissimo, while the sum paid at the signing of the contract was little more than a symbolic gesture. However, from that sale a new economy would arise, that marble industry longed for by Leo X, by the Lordship of Florence and by Cosimo I Medici would eventually develop and would, in a few decade, create thousands of jobs and profoundly change the structure of an endemically poor territory.

N OT E S 1 F. Campana, Analisi storica politica economica sulla Versilia granducale del Settecento, care of F. Giannini, voll. 3, Massarosa 1968, vol. II, pp. 81-82. 2 G. Targioni Tozzetti, Relazioni d’alcuni viaggi fatti in diverse parti della Toscana, Firenze 176879, p. 203. 3 Ibidem, p. 205. 4 E. Repetti, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana, voll. 6, Firenze 1833-46, vol. V, pp. 264-265. 5 Historical Archive of the Municipality of Seravezza, Parties from 1816 to 1825, Book 14, ff. 91-92. Minutes of the meeting of 28 February 1820: the Gonfalonier and the Priors of the Seravezza Community deliberate the sale to dr. Marco Borrini of a plot of land located in Mount Altissimo; copy in the Henraux Historical Archive, Patrimonial XIII, 32, fasc. 2. The measure or quantity of the goods sold, “rose” to 275 Saia and eight tenths, will give rise to forty years later to heated disputes, not yet dormant to the present day. The reality – and this is our opinion supported by numerous documents – at the time of the sale, only a part of the whole sold, that is considered productive, was quantified and estimated (albeit at a low, almost symbolic price), while the remaining part was given free of charge as a buffer area for the quarries, thought to be mostly unproductive and in any case not accessible to anyone other than the expert workers, due to the frequent use of mines and the rockfalls that made the area dangerous. And also shortly after, for the sale made by the Municipality of Seravezza of the quarries of Cappella, Giustagnana and Trambiserrato to private individuals. 6 Henraux Historical Archive, Assets, XIII, 32, fasc. 2. 7 Historical Archive of the Municipality of Seravezza, Side, quote., Book 14, f. 94. 8 Historical Archive of the Municipality of Pietrasanta, Letters of the I. and R. Office of the Fossi of Pisa from 1816 to 1822, Filza C 46. c. 1149; copy in the Henraux Historical Archive, Patrimonial XIII, 32, fasc. 2. 9 R. Barbacciani Fedeli, Saggio storico politico agrario e commerciale dell’antica e moderna Versilia, Firenze 1845, pp. 256-257. 10 Giovanni Fabbroni report to Leonardo Frullani, Councilor of State, Director of RR. Finances of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, on the inspection of the Mount Altissimo deposits, dated 19 October 1820. State Archives of Florence, position no. 11 of the Extraordinary Protocol of Affairs of the Department of Finance, resolved by His A.I. and Reale from 1 to 31 January 1821, relating to the archive of the Secretariat of Finance.

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The site of the ADI Design Museum in Milano. Ph. Miro Zagnoli

Design

ADI DESIGN MUSEUM. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADE IN ITALY BY ALDO COLONETTI

Born in Milan, the ADI Design Museum – Compasso d’Oro is an international centre for a wide variety of activities - creative, professional and social - that revolve around design. It will be one of the largest museums in Europe dedicated to design culture, with a permanent exhibition of over two thousand pieces, temporary exhibitions and spaces for work and for reflection. 57

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A new museum, when it is born, already has a collection from which to refer regarding the design point of view, because the container and content must be considered, albeit including a partial expressive autonomy, as the result of a consistent and coherent vision. This is not always the case in contemporary architecture, especially considering the increasingly important role of the architect, often understood as an artist capable of giving shape to an exhibition space, beyond its function and needs as a museum. This is a phenomenon of recent decades; it can be traced back to the postmodern movement, in particular to Robert Venturi’s famous book “Learning from Las Vegas” (1972) and later to the 1980 Venice Architectural Biennale, curated by Paolo Portoghesi. “The presence of the past”, completely rethought the idea of historical continuity, and in doing so, undermined the fundamental relationship between “form and content.” The architecture of a museum and its

artistic contents strive to speak two autonomous and parallel languages; it is up to the visitor to discover those relationships which can enrich the meaning of a work that has been contextualized in a space, which in turn expresses a strong, and often, dissonant aesthetic dimension in respect to the content. Another design discourse takes place when the theme of a new museum is not presented totally “turnkey”, for example with a precise collection of works from a specific era and specific aesthetic research. In contrast, it can be the result of a process, certainly historical, within which, however, the variables are more numerous than the constants. Rather, when one of the typical cultural dimensions of our time, such as industrial design, has to be put on display, particular construction needs come into play which, perhaps, as in our case, are more easily found in the industrial archaeology of the 1900s, than in an autonomous architecture, “proud” of its expressive identity.

When one of the typical cultural dimensions of our time, such as industrial design, has to be put on display, particular construction needs come into play which, perhaps, as in our case, are more easily found in the industrial archaeology of the 1900s, than in an autonomous architecture, “proud” of its expressive identity.

The site of the ADI Design Museum in Milano. Above photo by Angelo Margutti

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Chair in iron, sheet metaland foam rubber DU 30, design Gastone Rinaldi for RIMA, Compasso d’Oro 1954. Restored in 2011 by the Centro Conservazione e Restauro “La Venaria reale” of Torino. Ph. Mimmo Capurso / Archivio fotografico Fondazione ADI Collezione Compasso d’Oro

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The Compasso d’Oro ADI Design Museum represents a unique model in the international scene: firstly, it is a collection that will grow over time, because it will have to collect (alongside the 2300 objects that are already part of this cultural heritage which the various international juries have selected from Italian production, originally every three years, and currently every two, since 1954) objects from future decades that we do not yet know; secondly, it represents an extraordinary setting from which to observe the oscillations of taste, a stage where the heroes are the most important architects and designers in the world, a true thermometer of our time. Finally, all this is presented, dynamically and openly, within a kind of small-town, located in some old industrial buildings, originally a tram depot and subsequently an electricity distribution centre. It is in a central district of Milan, between the Feltrinelli Foundation of Herzog & De Meuron

and the up and coming Museum of the Resistance, a few hundred meters from Brera. The site covers almost 5000 square meters overall, including the museum, warehouses, offices and a restaurant; the restructuring project consisting of great engineering quality and above all, through its transparency, existing in harmony with the city around it, is by Giancarlo Perotta, led by Aldo Bottini and Carlo Valtolina. The exhibition layout is by the Migliore+Servetto studio and above it all, the new emblem was conceived by Italo Lupi: as is consistent in all his works, historical memory interacts with a possibility of being easily conveyed with new technologies. The Project Manager of the ADI Design Museum is Andrea Cancellato who was director of the Triennale from 2002 to 2018, and between 1994 and 2007 and as head of the CLAC has made the Compasso d’Oro collection world famous.

Portable typewriter Lettera 22, design by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti, Compasso d’Oro 1954. Ph. Mimmo Capurso / Archivio fotografico Fondazione ADI Collezione Compasso d’Oro

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It is the first time that it is possible to see in a clear way, represented in an institutional space, through everyday objects, the changes of our daily life, revealing hundreds of authors who, oftentimes, have remained behind the scenes.

Fan Zerowatt V.E. 505, design by Enzo Pirali for Fabbriche Elettriche Riunite, Compasso d’Oro 1954. Ph. Mimmo Capurso / Archivio fotografico Fondazione ADI Collezione Compasso d’Oro Right, the site of the ADI Design Museum a Milano

The ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale [Association for Industrial Design]) was founded in 1957 by designers and intellectuals such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Giò Ponti, Alberto Rosselli, Marco Zanuso, Gillo Dorfles and Augusto Morello. It is the only association in the world where there are designers, architects, companies, theorists and historians: it is a “militant” observatory, which through design monitors “Made in Italy” and all its products, from home to work, from fashion to food and from automotive to production technologies. For this reason, the museum is unique in the world; certainly a great autobiography of our country, but not only, because it is a collection of stories of men, territories, research, technologies, new and old materials at the centre of which is always, however, the “person”: a conception of

the great industrial revolutions of the past, present and future. As was said on the occasion of the presentation of the project, by Luciano Galimberti, President of ADI, and Umberto Cabin, President of the Compasso d’Oro Foundation: “It is the first time that it is possible to see in a clear way, represented in an institutional space, through everyday objects, the changes of our daily life, revealing hundreds of authors who, oftentimes, have remained behind the scenes.” We are all, together, authors and consumers, designers and citizens, just as Rogers wrote in the 1950s, “dal cucchiaio alla città (From the spoon to the city).” A new museum in a location from the last century reinterpreted in the light of new technologies: you will enter without a physical ticket, but by using an app.

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Arte Masters of Henraux Art The

RENZO MAGGI.

POETIC I MAESTRI DELl’HENRAUX SCULPTOR BY ROBERTO BERNABÒ PHOTO NICOLA GNESI

A series of interviews and insights dedicated to the masters who have collaborated with Henraux over the years, opens with the figure of Renzo Maggi. In his conversation with Roberto Bernabò, Maggi tells us about his training and his collaborations, but also about politics and his relationship with marble, a connection built from pathos and poetry.

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RENZO MAGGI.

POETICAMENTE SCULTORE DI ROBERTO BERNABÒ FOTO DI NICOLA GNESI

Si apre con la figura di Renzo Maggi la serie di interviste e di approfondimenti dedicati ai maestri che hanno collaborato con l’Henraux nel corso degli anni. Nella sua conversazione con Roberto Bernabò, Maggi ci racconta della sua formazione, delle sue collaborazioni, ma anche della politica e del suo rapporto con il marmo, fatto di pathos e poesia.

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Renzo Maggi, A man who has lived 76 years in the Querceta countryside, is a man who loves life, who dreams and who seeks new tales of humanity in stone. Illuminated by Elena’s love [...], he conveys passion, light and warmth.

When we meet - via Skype, in the way the pandemic has forced us to manage social relationships - Renzo Maggi jogs my memory. It is a flash of lightning. That face sculpted by the strong signs that enhance the different elements, I see it there, in a painting by Virio Bresciani that I hung in the living room. Virio was an introverted and solitary painter from Pietrasanta, he was an investigator of the depths of the human soul, who sadly left us in 1990. Perhaps the affinity ends here, inside that portrait, because Renzo Maggi, a man who has lived 76 years in the Quecerta countryside, is a man who loves life, who dreams and who seeks new tales of humanity in stone. Illuminated by Elena’s love - “it’s all in my life, she has dedicated intelligence, beauty and dedication to me; if I hadn’t had a person who loved art and spurred me on in hard times I don’t know what

I would be today” - he conveys passion, light and warmth. But it makes me think, as we speak, that he too, had to work hard to conquer in his homeland, the dimension of the artist that belongs to him. Because Pietrasanta and Versilia, in their provinciality, end up bowing to the artistic dimensions of the stranger rather than that of those born from their womb. Perhaps because stonemasons, ornatists, sculptors - as they shared, simplifying, in a sort of social scale of skills - have always given hands and technical knowledge to the artist, but thought of themselves as something else, basically excluding creativity from the scope of their craft. And so I find a trait that returns to link not only the picture, but the lives of Virio and Renzo. A journey into art with Renzo Maggi can only start with the boy who has always

The Masters of Henraux Art

breathed marble and beauty. From his roots in this land which has been defined since Michelangelo by quarry and art. A matrix that for a few decades, in the last century, lost its way in industrial production. But which today, has found a balance by intertwining technology with the new expressions of culture. Roberto Bernabò: When did you get the feeling that you wanted to be an artist? Is there a beginning to a life with many faces like yours? Renzo Maggi: My maternal grandfather was head of security in the Henraux quarries; my paternal one rented a quarry above Massa. My father, on the other hand, was a specialized stonemason. His dream was to have three boys and for one of them to be a sculptor. The Institute of art, and Academia were the escape from the class and the dream. At 5 or 6 years

old, I helped to polish marble jars or letters on the kitchen table with pumice. This was my childhood in a world of strong feelings and sober lifestyle. A powerful world that moulded you through the dignity of work. R.B.: The history of your training was a journey in a craft that continued with your studies followed by work in the artisan’s workshop. How important was it? R.M.: It was everything. At the age of 15, while attending the Istituto d’arte, on the advice of Professor Franco Miozzo, that summer I went to the studio of the sculptor Leonida Parma, Leò. This was the place of my training: professional, cultural and political. I spent three years modeling clay. I made copies of the greats from the past, I studied anatomy. But it was much more: I took what was left of the atmosphere of the

The Masters of Henraux Art

The Masters of Henraux

Like a pianist who has to play ten hours a day in order to play Chopin, I learned the technique and today I can sculpt live. I draw with charcoal on the stone and I let myself go to my dreams.

Renaissance workshops. We were focused on beauty and I devoured the books of Leopardi, Foscolo and Dante. I listened to Rachmaninov and I went to see the films they recommended. I also spent time with Romano Cosci, Leonidas’ main assistant: he was six years older than me and he would become a famous sculptor. R.B.: Growing up in the workshop, you matured early and had the courage to leave Pietrasanta at the age of 19. R.M.: Yes, the sculptor Vincenzo Gasperetti was looking for a person for his workshop in Milan to model roundels that celebrated great Flemish painters for the coinage of Brazil. They were modeled with plasticine. It was a beautiful job and I was well paid. Milan was a school, I was a thin provincial boy and, without mythologizing, I thought: “Damn, what a nice ride”. R.B.: This experience in Milan led you to Switzerland to model mannequins. Tell me about that job. R.M.: I went to make high fashion mannequins for the Schläppi AG factory. In contact with fashion magazines. I worked with models with beautiful bodies. But, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t understand anything about women. I was totally focused on beauty for 15 years. I made the models in clay and then they were reproduced almost as unique pieces. It was the tradition of window mannequins that had spread in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. And we did them for the windows of department stores in Germany, France and the USA.

A portrait of Renzo Maggi displayed in his studio

R.B.: This work certainly underlined your relationship with the human body and beauty. But Switzerland, with thanks to politics, was much more important in the progress of your formation. R.M.: I met the sublime aesthetic of the nude that has since distinguished me, there. I do not conceive of female beauty in a carnal way, but like the ancient prehistoric Venuses she is the great mother to me. Then I became enriched by visiting the great museums and knowing the art.

Switzerland was also a political commitment. I joined the Communist Party in Zurich along with many other Italians. It was the era of Eurocommunism. I became section secretary and director, from 1977 to 1981, of the fortnightly “Realtà Nuova”. I am passionate about politics with the dream of a socialism of equality. I was a reformer against dictatorships. And also against schematisms in art. That party was not obscurantist, but instead inspired by hope. The political passion was born from the years in Leonidas’ workshop and then from a confrontation in my time in Milan with the sculptor Gigi Supino who made me read from Tolstoj to Dostoevskij. In Switzerland, as an emigrant, I fell in love with Russian, French and Shakespearean poetry. And today, when I read contemporaries I immediately feel a different depth and I stay away from it. And so, this was my Switzerland and life in Zurich. Then in 1992 I came back to Pietrasanta with Elena and my one year old son Ariele. I was a consultant for a Swiss design company. After 5 years everything ended and then I definitely chose the path of sculpture. I did funeral art, I started to make faces, to engrave. I acquired a deep technical knowledge of the tools, which then allowed me an extraordinary freedom of expression. Like a pianist who has to play ten hours a day in order to play Chopin, I learned the technique and today I can sculpt live. I draw with charcoal on the stone and I let myself go to my dreams. In short, I have resumed with strength and obstinacy a path that I had started many years before. In Zurich I had already sculpted a lot. I had a small studio downtown, I knew people, I was a character. I came back here, to my Versilia, to be an anonymous sculptor. R.B.: The meeting with Henraux, which represents the history of marble and which is experiencing a new season in its life, seems to me to reflect another phase of your life. How did this fruitful relationship come about?

The Masters of Henraux Art

The Masters of Henraux

R.M.: In 2003 Paolo Carli became the majority shareholder of Henraux. I went to a party in the quarries with the first catalog of a 1999 exhibition in Populonia. We talked and it was love at first sight. From there we began to collaborate, experimenting for example with the production of the complex sculptures of Tony Cragg in a time before robotics. He wanted to grow Henraux using the myth of Erminio Cidonio, of those years in the sixties in which the company was an international center of contemporary sculpture. In short, the idea of a factory that is also a beating heart of the culture of a territory. Alongside the traditional marble processing, Carli understands clearly the need for a connection with art. He knows what marble can say, he knows its expressive power. Over the years he became outraged, seeing polished tiles that sold for less than ceramic. Marble is the history of humanity! Mediterranean culture begins with the Parthenon and the sculptures of Egypt with Lisippo, Fidia, they are men who shaped our world. R.B.: It is a processing of marble, that is not only technical, but cultural, it is a breath of time. Innovating in technology but with a soul, a mixture of history and present. Here, I would say that Maggi within this industrial context is the breath of thought that keeps the worlds united. R.M.: I’m pleased by the definition. You see, for a decade, more and more, advanced robotics has arrived. Carli has invested in robots and engineers who understand the possibility of these machines. But at the same time he has believed in sculptors who come from all

over the world; he created the Henraux Prize, the Foundation, the magazine and the fundamental connection with design that rules in the showroom. Thus, marble has become a precious material and beauty has become an absolute value. Today Henraux has surpassed me: new machines, sophisticated techniques, rationality, order and cleanliness. I feel that I am inside a new world that I struggle to penetrate. Because I remain a sculptor who works with his hands. But man is immortal because he has thought. And I get up every day and think, I invent. My youth is in my ability to dream. R.B.: Thought, dream, creation. Understanding its paths has a great charm. Your work is made from a direct aggression of material. Why? R.M.: Because a model limits you. Picasso said: “I don’t search, I find”. If you already have a pre-established model when you sculpt, you arrive where you left. Let’s think about poetry: it is the moment of writing that makes the mind explode. So it is for me with sculpture: I want to be a poetic sculptor. So I am very critical of contemporary art that does not sculpt. It seems to me more design, street furniture. This is also true with some art critics: writing about a work is not describing it but exploring the genesis process. The great critics of the past studied deeply, many today are celebrities on TV. R.B.: Let’s return to marble, its strength, its poetry. What is the connection between the material that you choose and the dream which gives it shape?

A model limits you. Picasso said: “I don’t search, I find”. If you already have a preestablished model when you sculpt, you arrive where you left. Let’s think about poetry: it is the moment of writing that makes the mind explode. So it is for me with sculpture: I want to be a poetic sculptor.

The Masters of Henraux

Renzo Maggi’s studio

R.M.: To begin with, I did not like white marble, I found it cold, frigid. Then on the Cervaiole, in the “Russian quarry” where at the end of the nineteenth century they extracted marble for the church of Saint Isaac in St. Petersburg, I discovered this pure white but fleshcolored marble, with a transparency and a unique crystal. The Greeks gave things meaning: marmaros means shimmering, transparent. In that marble up there I found beautiful scales and I made sweet, carnal sculptures. I realized that this was Greek marble, like that of Paros. Only the marble of the Cervaiole has this poetic possibility. But it doesn’t

acquiesce. You cannot skip even a small step or the result is denied. R.B.: And what sometimes drives you to using other materials? R.M.: Surprise. Stone is easier to work with. It is sweeter, less superhuman. With a bursting blow or by leaving it raw it already tells its life through color. White marble is not easy, if you do not give it its full form, if you do not strip it, it will not give itself. And then the speed: in one day you pull out a female bust from travertine. With marble, to get to Heaven you have to go from Hell, just like Dante.

Design

THE SHAPE OF TASTE.

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVIDE OLDANI AND ATTILA VERESS BY ALESSIA DELISI

The relationship between design and food is enriched by a new project that brings together the Luce di Carrara brand, chef Davide Oldani – with sous chef Alessandro Procopio – and designer Attila Veress. Two small dishes made of a fine Marquina black marble that bring the unique shape of a candlestick to the simple and ancient gesture of putting olive oil on bread.

Davide Oldani. Ph. Mauro Crespi

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Attila Veress

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Plate A.P., black marquina marble, design by Attila Veress in collaboration with Luce di Carrara. Ph. Mauro Crespi

Alessia Delisi: In 1963 Bruno Munari wrote Good Design, a jewel of acumen and ironic rigour that treated an orange as a good industrial product, an example of good design, or to be precise, “an almost perfect object where there is an absolute coherence between form, function and consumption.” It seems to me that your project for Luce di Carrara (the A.P. and Bread Plates) was born precisely from a desire to make the beauty of natural products such as bread and oil, functional, and therefore usable, alongside the wisdom of their juxtaposition. Davide Oldani: That’s exactly right. The starting point of the project was, in fact, an idea of food, that is, the possibility of making a product that is normally liquid, or rather oil, solid. But it was also the simple gesture of putting oil on bread. We started from here, because, as I always say, great ideas come from food, which of course must be arranged in a certain way and put in a position to express itself in the best way. In this case, the idea was proffered by Alessandro Procopio, my sous chef. Alessandro Procopio: We have been using beeswax for some time at D’O, we began a few years ago with a Wellington fillet

steak that was submerged in beeswax – which formed a vanilla-flavoured wrapper – and then cooked. But now, instead, we were looking for a simple aperitif to offer to our guests. And what’s better than bread and oil? So, by adding a small amount of beeswax to extra virgin olive oil, adding coriander, apricot kernels or other very fragrant seeds, we created a completely edible candle to be brought to the table, lit and tasted with our bread. To create an impressive dinner. D.O.: It is also impeccable from an aesthetic point of view. My contribution was in fact, to choose an Italian product such as one of the Luce di Carrara marbles to form a candlestick with soft, minimal lines. A.D.: And here Attila Veress’s design comes into play… Attila Veress: Davide had shown me some prototypes and our conversation started from there. Sometimes it can be difficult to imagine an object without ever having seen it, but the chef already had clear ideas on a visual level and knew which gestures were better to give to the product. I must say then that, having developed other projects with Oldani and Luce di Carrara,

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Plate A.P., sketches

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it was all pretty easy and fun too: first, the company made prototypes in marble which it gradually perfected following our indications (the beauty of marble is that it can be milled, 3D printing is not always necessary) and later the craftsmen engraved bees and olives. D.O.: And the logo, A.P., which is the name of the dish, but also the acronym of Alessandro Procopio. A.V.: Of which, Alexander knew nothing until the last moment... D.O.: It was a gift I thought up and Attila made for my sous chef. It’s funny because with his initials we created a word that represents him while he speaks through the dish. I firmly believe in being a team, with me, on the one hand, supporting Alessandro’s idea and Attila, on the other, who reassembles the aesthetic value of the food project in a precise and technologically perfect way. Last, but not least, there’s the contribution of Luce di Carrara which allowed us to play with marble, choosing a Marquina black (deep, furrowed with subtle and decisive white marks) to create a unique object,

in harmony with the environment of the restaurant. A.D.: Everything is therefore planned, also, and above all, the food... D.O.: Absolutely, the starting point, as I mentioned, is always the food, which needs to be plated in ways that enhance it. And since I can’t always find serving dishes that go along with my idea, most of the time I have them specially made, as in this case. A.D.: What about the decorative element represented by the shapes of bees and olives? Is it just a simple embellishment? D.O.: It is communication, a way in another voice that lets the customer know what he is eating. The candlestick itself, its undulating profile, is not only beautiful but also useful for resting the spoon. A.V.: The shape is therefore not limited to a simple function, but also takes on a decorative value. A.D.: You two seem to know each other quite well, when did you meet? Had you

Design What I like most about young people – I am referring to Attila, but also to Alessandro Procopio – is the energy they put into things when they are left free to express themselves. I also feel I can grow by being with them.

already heard about each other’s work? D.O.: It was about eight or nine years ago, I was looking for someone who could put my ideas down on paper. So I asked the director of the IED at the time who gave me Attila’s name. I remember the excellent impression the first time I met him, so we immediately started working together. I must say that we have shared projects during all this time. What I like most about young people – I am referring to Attila, but also to Alessandro Procopio – is the energy they put into things when they are left free to express themselves. I also feel I can grow by being with them. In essence, however, there is not only mutual respect but also a deep human connection. A.V.: I knew very little about David’s world when I was given this opportunity that positively changed my life and above all my relationship with food. By chance, in fact, a week before we met, I had attended a conference where he talked about his idea of cooking. It struck me so much that immediately after, I went shopping, thinking in a completely

different way than usual. It is true that ours is a working collaboration, but over time it has resulted in a friendship. Not to mention that, having known each other for so long, only a few words are enough for me to understand what he has in his head. Our feeling is such that sometimes I take the liberty of drawing independently, also based on just a little information. D.O.: For example, in this case, I showed him some prototypes and two or three photos taken from the internet that represented something which I didn’t want... A.D.: How did your collaboration with the Henraux brand, Luce di Carrara come about? D.O.: I had known Paolo Carli, the director of Henraux, for a long time, what I knew less well was the world of marble. It was Paolo’s skills, his professionalism, the input he began to give me (in addition of course to the extraordinary nature of the products made by the company) that encouraged me to choose to rely on Luce

Design

Plate A.P., black marquina marble, design by Attila Veress in collaboration with Luce di Carrara. Ph. Mauro Crespi

Design I believe that in order to live well you also need “great food”. The visual aspect will accompany this product which must be “pampered” by a container capable of giving it even more value. In fact, the content is the soul, the shape is important if it gives value to the content.

di Carrara for the completion of the A.P. Plate and the Bread Plate. A.D.: Now that the ancient culinary traditions have entered by rights into the world of design competence, one wonders what shape the food of the future will have, what provocations and daring experiments we will witness... D.O.: I think that the food of the future will have an irregular shape. I imagine this following the few seasons that will remain and their changes. We will draw on food, but leave it in its natural form. On the other hand, alongside the irregularity of the products, I figure the equality of pills, concentrates of proteins, vitamins and carbohydrates which, from here to the next twenty, thirty, if not even forty years, will alternate with the

increasing time that we will dedicate to cooking – because I believe that in order to live well you also need “great food”. The visual aspect will accompany this product which must be “pampered” by a container capable of giving it even more value. In fact, the content is the soul, the shape is important if it gives value to the content: this is my claim. A.V.: Davide and I have been dealing with these topics for years and I must say that we are in perfect harmony. D.O.: I would add that design was born for a purpose, to preserve a product for example, or to serve it, to make its presentation more elegant. Design must be useful and practical for me. A.V.: And now we return to Munari’s orange…

Architecture

Sketch of the project Dimensional Place, Charlotte, North Carolina, external view

Architecture

MATERIALITY, MEMORY, ART Dimensional Place, Charlotte, North Carolina BY TURAN DUDA

From the tactile quality of stone and its characteristic stratification of time, Architect Turan Duda gets inspiration for his project in Charlotte, North Carolina: a modern building in an historic district where art in stone finds space to be experienced.

Architecture Architettura

Each pattern expresses intrigue both about the many uses of the mountain’s stone over hundreds of years and about how those patterns reflect man’s employment of particular tools to extract the stone. These markings are variegated, random and raw, with a history of their own.

Top, wall detail Right, Dimensional place, exteriors

The art and science of making Architecture presents many sources with the potential to inspire. We can dwell in the realm of program, functionality, practicality, theory or any number of other devices for the creation process. Perhaps the most rewarding and visceral is the use of materiality and memory. The tactile and sensory qualities of materials possess the power to evoke strong sensations and connections. When asked to place modern architecture into a beloved and historic Charlotte, North Carolina warehouse district, I looked to the scale and material conditions of existing structures near the building site. I’ve encountered similar challenges in cities in the United States experiencing growth, where the longdiscarded structures of an industrial past become hosts to modern life. My client for the project, Tim Hendricks, and I have enjoyed a long relationship in creating architecture. He challenged me to capture the historical nature of this cherished neighborhood in a way that mediates between the past and the needs of a modern corporate headquarters. I traveled to the project site, where I observed the clay tile walls of a nearby factory were worn and weathered by time. These walls became a point of inspiration

that drew me to the quarries of Mount Altissimo. On every trip to these quarries, I have strong memories of the processes of cutting, chiseling and chipping away at the stone. Equally so, I see the artifacts of the process, the raw blocks against the quarry floor, the pattern of markings the tools make across the quarry walls, the raw edges and uneven pattern left on those walls as material is extracted. Each pattern uniquely marks a specific undertaking and its maker’s vision for the use of stone. Each pattern, for me, also expresses intrigue both about the many uses of the mountain’s stone over hundreds of years and about how those patterns reflect man’s employment of particular tools to extract the stone. These markings are variegated, random and raw, with a history of their own. Equally fascinating are the ancient stone walls of Italy’s cities that show the pattern of change over time. These stone walls speak of their history as they are punctured, altered, repaired, filled in, opened and closed up again. The Charlotte factory’s tile walls are marked by their own city’s cycle of growth, decline and rebirth. This client and I agree that we, as developer and architect, should bring an aspect of art to the public in every building we create. Thus, our shared vision was that

Architecture

In my experience, Henraux has always found a technology to achieve the desired personality of the stone. With the Titanium Travertine, the heavy “water-jet” finish produced the raw, time worn surface we desired.

Top and left, Dimensional Place, external view

this new building, and the design for its lobby and ground level experience, both be art and invite the installation of art. The transparent lobby space and its connection to pedestrians walking by were essential to the overall architecture, as the multistory tower pulls back from the street to shape three public activity nodes for the building’s triangular site. One corner’s art plaza serves as the entrance to the 30-foottall grand lobby that became the focus of our collaboration in stone. With a sketch done on the airplane to Italy in hand, the process of combining these points of inspiration began with the

selection of stone. Slabs of Travertino Titanium provided the ideal composition, signature, color and vibrancy to lend itself to being etched away. The smooth surface of the honed travertine, however, was lacking the time-worn character we were seeking. In my experience, Henraux has always found a technology to achieve the desired personality of the stone. With the Titanium Travertine, the heavy “waterjet” finish produced exactly what we were looking for. I also sought to create depth – as in the dense masonry walls of the ancient past rather than modern veneers of stone on

Architecture

Dimensional Place, internal view

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Top, detail of an interior wall and a quarry wall Left, Turan Duda

steel structures today – and echo the sense of the material being pushed in and out by human hands over time. The result is a massive, fragmented stone wall, rich in texture, form and color. Simultaneously art and a backdrop to the textural volumes introduced in the installations of organic forms of natural wood lath seating and a corresponding table that emerge like a serpent from the lobby’s floor. These elements are light, delicate and fluid in

contrast to the strength and structure of the stone walls. Above, a glass curved tower is articulated with earth-toned vertical fins and metal framing along the main building façades. The slim form speaks to the desire for a strong, yet distinctly contemporary profile to mark a modern gateway to the future of Charlotte’s historic South End district. In contrast, the discovery of a suggested history resides at the heart of the building’s lobby interiors.

Art

ISAMU NOGUCHI,

TAJAPIERE BY ALESSANDRA BALDINI

Isamu Noguchi is among the extraordinary artists who have worked at Henraux and fallen in love with it. It is a love that is not only directed to the excellence of the stone material, but also at an experience that is full of passion and competence and at a unique quality of relations that has woven here, which will forever bind the artist to the Versilian territory, and to the whole of Italy.

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Isamu Noguchi all’Henraux. Courtesy Archivio Henraux

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Above and left, Isamu Noguchi at work in Henraux. Courtesy Archivio Henraux

In an interview from 1986 on the occasion of the monumental sculpture-toy Slide Mantra’s “gondola trip to the Venice Biennale”, Isamu Noguchi evoked his decades-long relationship with the region between the Apuan Alps and the sea: “I found out about you whilst living in Paris and so I wanted to visit Versilia where I was attracted by your mountains and the wonderful marble which I had already known in my works but which I had never seen up close. Unfortunately, I lived half a century without ever knowing you personally”, the American-Japanese sculptor told “Versilia Oggi” about his first trip to the quarries in 1954, accompanied by his wife Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi. Noguchi then returned in a more “operational” way four years later, attracted by the hospitable manner of Erminio Cidonio, the President of Henraux: “He even opened his house to me, he introduced me to magnificent workers such as Giulio Cardini, Ugo Giannini and Giorgio Angeli”, continued the artist, explaining that he continued to come to the area even after the end of the “Cidonium era” for at least one month a year: “I live the other half of the year in New York and the rest in Japan. In short, I have three loves: America, Japan and Versilia.” Noguchi had gone to look for marble to use in his creations in Greece before he discovered Tuscany, “in the land of myths that his mother Leonie Gilmour had told him about”, explains Nizette Brennan, an artist from Washington, who was active in Pietrasanta in the seventies and who worked with him in Versilia and New York at that time. Another giant of 20th-century art helped hijack the sculptor on the Apuan Alps, Henry Moore, with whom Noguchi had worked on the UNESCO garden of Peace and who, precisely at Henraux in 1957, had created the large Travertine Reclining Figure, installed the following year near the new Y-shaped building on the Place de Fontenoy. Moore was in love with Versilia: in 1965 he bought a small villa on via Civitali in Vittoria

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Apuana in which a hole in the garden hedge framed Michelangelo’s Altissimo and the quarry: “I was like a child in front of a pastry shop window”, the British sculptor once said about his first visit to the mountain. The same feeling that Noguchi must have felt at his first approach to Altissimo, “Michelangelo’s mountain (as written in notes from 1964) and his spirit still permeates the countryside.” And then, in a letter to his friend Priscilla Morgan, “this is a paradise for sculptors”, or again in an ironic interview with the Times in 1968, on the occasion of his first solo show in London at Gimbels Fils after a new season of work at Henraux, “a paradise for older sculptors, but young people like me go there as well”. At that time Noguchi was 64 years old “but appeared to be less than 50, slim, athletic, and giving off the impression of a creative energy without respite”, wrote the British newspaper. Every six months, literally, until less than a month before his death in December 1988, Noguchi returned regularly to the quarries, renewing his love for marble that he had learned to respect during his Parisian apprenticeship with Constantin Brancusi. “He liked the area, as well as the people he worked with, the machines that were available and the mountain itself”, recalls Hayden Herrera in the 2016 biography Listening to Stone in which he references a passage from Noguchi’s autobiography A Sculpture World: “It is exceptional to find a company that is dedicated to promoting a modern use of marble.” Noguchi began to be truly diligent in Querceta with the sculpture seminars organized by Henraux in 1963. Writing in the third issue of the magazine Marmo, the critic Giuseppe Marchiori describes the Japanese-American sculptor at work in the atelier “with the assiduity and commitment of a worker engaged in his ‘job’.” Noguchi became a “‘marble worker’ (the most current of the ‘marble workers’, capable of suggesting themes and solutions of an ornamental nature to architects) with Japanese patience.” And always

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Above, Isamu Noguchi, Khmer, 1962-66. Right, Isamu Noguchi, Billy Rose Sculpture Garden, The Israel Museum, Gerusalemme. Courtesy Archivio Henraux

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Art Left, a view of the Henraux garden conceived by Noguchi

Marchiori evokes the artist “curved, in the most exhausting poses, on the pieces of marble chosen here and there, according to empirical criteria probably, and for hours and hours the tireless worker dug and cut with the mechanical and manual means of the ancient ‘tajapiere’. Noguchi, with his face whitened by marble dust, barely rose, turning for a moment to those who addressed him.” That year, Noguchi left Henraux “a precious garden project” in which the sculptures of the museum that Henraux was organizing in front of the buttresses of Altissimo would be placed: the idea was to combine the best sculptures from the seminars with works by great international artists such as Émile Gilioli, Alicia Penalba, Henri Georges Adam, Jean Arp, Georges Vantongerloo, Moore, Noguchi himself, Pietro Cascella and Costantino Nivola. The sculptor says: “Erminio Cidonio asked me to draw a small enclosure at Henraux to showcase the sculptures of the artists who had worked on it. Euripedes was made at that time. The chosen stones, their surface worked over time, had been excavated from Altissimo.” The garden was a project that didn’t take off. In 1971, again in Marmo, we read that “the carved marbles are arranged almost everywhere: in the spaces around the buildings and deposits”, even if their real seat should have been the “enclosure designed by Noguchi for the most beautiful sculptures created at Henraux”: those which, following the exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, ended up in the collections of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, known today as Banca Intesa. Walter Dusenbery, another American artist who worked with Noguchi in Versilia in the 1970s and 1980s and was part of a new generation who landed in the area between the Apuan Alps and the sea to work with stonemasons and foundries, tells us about this “enclosure.” “There was a small ‘sculpture garden’ at Henraux for which Noguchi had designed the bases of the sculptures, the entire space was about 230 square meters with six to eight spaces for individual sculptures. I clearly remember a bird by Arp”, says Dusenbery: “I know Cidonio would have liked Noguchi to design a real garden, but I don’t think it was ever built. Noguchi usually shared his plans with me.” Dusenbery had met Noguchi in Japan: “Isamu invited me to accompany him to Italy. He told me the experience would broaden my understanding of sculpture”. In 1971 Cidonio still had a great influence on Henraux despite the company’s financial difficulties that led to his resignation in 1968. “They gave me a studio in a corner of the vast stone park. At the time the other studios were occupied by Henry Moore, Marino Marini, Noguchi and Maria Papa. We had a shared and outdoor work area surrounded by our private studios.” Noguchi, who had initially rented a room a couple of kilometres from Querceta on the Apuan Alps, was a guest at Cidonio’s home in Via dello Stivale in Pietrasanta and the industrialist offered him and Carla Lavatelli a studio there. Each year Noguchi spent three or four months in Japan then went to Italy via India and from there to New York. After Cidonios’ death in 1971, he began to stay at the Augustus: “He once told me that he deserved and could afford to pay the exorbitant price of the room”. Giorgio Angeli, who had been Noguchi’s assistant at Henraux, offered him a studio on his parents’ farm that the sculptor used until his death.

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Isamu Noguchi, Slide Mantra, 1986 Courtesy Studio di scultura d’arte Giorgio Angeli

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Noguchi became covered himself in dust by facing the marble of Altissimo head-on: “Eat the stone and taste the flavour,” he wrote about the creation of Euripedes. Meanwhile, artists from all over the world, also covered in marble dust, had become a small colony in Versilia and Noguchi was particularly attached to two French-Canadians, Daniel Couvreur and Esther LaPointe, the latter who tragically died in a car accident in Versilia. “The locals called us ‘the dusty ones’, especially after the arrival of the Germans with their cars”, says Brennan recalling that phase in the mid-seventies: “Americans, Europeans, Asians, we lived in the area and worked in the laboratories in Carrara, Pietrasanta and Querceta. The place resonated with hammers: extraordinary music.” In Nizette’s memoirs, Noguchi was “an experienced and relaxed traveller”, recognized and appreciated by the international community. “He had Italian friends and once I accompanied him to dinner in a house in the Marina di Pietrasanta/Forte dei Marmi area. The conversation was lively and across the board, there was a lot of wine and we laughed a lot: Isamu didn’t like useless chatter”. The epilogue is Slide Mantra, the last monumental work completed two years before his death and made from eight marble blocks entirely at Giorgio Angeli. “Slide is a kind of homage to Italy, an appreciation of how things are made here”, explained Noguchi in the statement “What is Sculpture?” preserved in the Noguchi Museum archive in New York: “It is my adventure, an adventure in which Italy continues to be deeply involved.”.

ulletin

Bulletin

ALCHEMY IN HENRAUX

BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF, TEXT BY SUSANNA ORLANDO

Projects involving Henraux are, on-thewhole, international. From the East to the West, the company’s marble and practical know-how travel without borders. However, attention to the “local” never falters and a love for the territory manifests itself in many ways. This is indeed the case with the project created in collaboration with the artist Roberta Busato and the Galleria Susanna Orlando: set into motion by Paolo Carli’s initial interest in the artist’s work, which he discovered during an exhibition at the Pietrasanta gallery. The project continued through a collaboration comprising a sharing of means and know-how, and finally resulted in the completion of the work Il Profeta Guerriero (The Warrior-Prophet). We asked gallery owner Susanna Orlando to tell us a bit about the process. Susanna Orlando: During the vernissage of the exhibition dal Nero all’Ocra, at the

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Pietrasanta gallery in December 2018, I noticed that one of our esteemed guests, Mr Paolo Carli, attentively observed the works created in raw earth and straw by Roberta Busato, and since by now, I know how to recognize the attitude and posture of someone who is seriously attracted to a work of art, I wondered why the President of Henraux was so taken. The sculpture made with that material earth - was, in fact, the antithesis of his “daily bread”. In the famed company that he enthusiastically chairs, one walks amongst marble blocks and slabs, men covered in white, bridge cranes and milling machines, places where the voices of great masters of sculpture such as Henry Moore and Giò Pomodoro are still heard, whilst in the elegant showrooms you can admire imposing sculptures and sketches of all kinds, but they are all in that precious material that is, his majesty the Marble. Why was my friend Paolo so enraptured by Roberta’s raw earth?

In my opinion, simultaneously, the simplicity and the power of the poetic artefact combined with his desire to offer the young sculptress the opportunity to take advantage of modern robotics technology, have created a kind of magical alchemy. Roberta accepted with curiosity, and not without some trepidation, this challenge, entrusting the underlying work to a computer and following the evolution of her new creation step by step. And so, after a few months of adopting this new “robotic alchemy”, a beautiful statuary marble head was created, subsequently followed by an onyx one. The three heads of Busato (a mother and two daughters) are now well situated in the magnificent showroom, a perfect place for them to tell visitors about themselves and also the new technologies made available to art; technologies that however always need the loving gaze of the artist, and his final caress.

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Clockwise from above, three moments from the creation of the work Il profeta guerriero with the artist Roberta Busato Left, Roberta Busato, Il profeta guerriero, 2018-19, in three different versions, statuary marble, raw earth and straw, with onyx 45x25x30 cm each.

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JON RAFMAN. NEW AGE DEMANDED (PRINCE ARTHUR)

With the project titled New Age Demanded (Prince Arthur) Rafman is the winner of the competition for a public work of art within the context of the redevelopment of rue Prince Arthur East, in the PlateauMont-Royal arrondissement, for the occasion of the 375th anniversary of Montreal.

Inspired by the poetry of Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the piece is part of a reflection that was started by the artist with the New Age Demanded series of busts, which questions artistic representation in the contemporary era. Pound is quoted on the dedicated website newagedemanded.com:

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace ... The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme

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Jon Rafman, New Age Demanded (Prince Arthur), render

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Jon Rafman, New Age Demanded (Prince Arthur), render

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The artist once again multiplies the narrative plans, transforming his representations, born in a digital environment, to a sculptural form that is tangible and usable in the daily life of a city street, eliminating distinctions between the virtual and analogue world and between reality and representation.

In order to create the two sculptures, as has been done in some previous digital and analogical works, Rafman appropriates the modernist forms of the non-figurative art of the 1950s and 1960s by Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Jean (Hans) Arp – the same statuary preserved in the Henraux Collection – through the use of 3D modelling software for creating virtual renderings. The images created were then converted into real marble sculptures thanks to cutting-edge digitally controlled machinery. The artist once again multiplies the narrative plans, transforming his representations, born in a digital environment, to a sculptural form that is tangible and usable in the daily life of a city street, eliminating distinctions between the virtual and analogue world and between reality and representation. Through this project, the Henraux Foundation confirms its commitment to supporting innovative cultural and artistic projects in the field of technological experimentation. Internationally recognised for his passionate research on the media and the effects of its impact on society, Rafman’s best-known works include the 9-eyes.com website, a collection of images taken by the cameras of Google Street View cars, Kool-Aid Man (2008-11), a project for which Rafman used the Second Life virtual platform for three years, creating

an avatar in order to demonstrate how technology can create new representations of ourselves in virtual spaces, shaping new identities, and video Betamale Trilogy (2013-15), in which the artist uses the Internet as an infinite database of images, for a montage that becomes a portrait of the digital communities that populate the web, a portrait both seductive and repellent. Born in 1981 in Montreal, where he lives and works. After studying Literature and Philosophy at McGill University, Jon Rafman graduated in film, video and new media from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Rafman has exhibited in many international institutions and museums, including The 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (2019); The Modena Photography Foundation and Modena Civic Gallery (201819); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2017-18); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2016) Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015). A personal exhibition is being prepared for autumn 2020 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.

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TIMELESS.

THE TABLE OF TWELVE EXCELLENCES

The Timeless table was presented during the 2019 Salone del Mobile, it is a table that represents the meeting and fusion point of twelve Italian excellences united in a single project. It is a project in which Henraux participated with the enthusiasm of those who see the completion of a one-of-a-kind innovation. “Timeless is the result of an architecture composed of the sum of extraordinary gestures conducted by excellent workers states Henraux President, Paolo Carli - in which very different materials and processes intersect, some of them harmonized for the first time, such as marble and steel, and which give the table an unprecedented beauty.” Timeless is the representative and expression of an important message: unity and connection. It represents a turning point for those companies that represent Made in Italy in the world every day. It does not matter the sector of goods to which it belongs, what matters is “Italianness” and Italian know-how. “Networking”, this should be the keyword. The uniqueness of the project is already clear from its beginnings, signed by the internationally renowned artist Helidon Xhixha. It was born from an idea of merging past and present by conceiving a base that combines two eternal and timeless materials: marble, a material that over the centuries has told the history of art through the great artists who sculpted it, and stainless steel, a contemporary material belonging to the

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technological and industrial universe. Between these two materials runs an internal LED light strip capable of illuminating and making the base stand out, even more, creating a disruptive light effect between marble and steel. Timeless’s surface sees Riva 1920 expressing itself sublimely through a tabletop made with Kauri, a millennial wood from New Zealand, it is 5 meters long and with resin inserts. About 50,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, a series of cataclysms still unexplained today felled entire Kauri forests by submerging them with water and mud. The particular characteristics of this mud and the absolute lack of oxygen have allowed these plants, which have been trapped in the swamps for tens of thousands of years, to challenge the chemical processes of decomposition and petrification, to arrive intact to this day. Digging in the ground you meet real “wood mines”; the exceptionality lies in the fact that despite the millennial permanence under the mud these trunks are perfectly preserved and have the same characteristics as a freshly cut wood. The Timeless table also contains an exclusive and innovative clock made by La Vallée, which is the result of several years of research and development. The M30TP mechanism with which it is equipped is completely visible and incorporates a perpetual calendar designed with a mechanism that revolutionizes the canons of traditional watchmaking. Its specially designed

architecture blends together a loadbearing structure and timepiece for the first time. All of the information in the perpetual calendar is displayed on large snap disks with magnetically controlled speeds, which rotate within components of the structure and are arranged on several levels. The innovative design of this clock allows you to view all the information including that of the hours and minutes, from both sides of the table. This exclusive creation boasts 12 innovative patent-pending devices including: a balance with adjustable thermal compensation, a charge indication fully integrated in the barrel and a calendar with a reduced number of components and bidirectional adjustment. This masterpiece of mechanics shows, as a centrepiece, a large “flying” tourbillon escapement without cage and bridges, that can oscillate at the same frequency as the heartbeat of its owner. The project is finished by a Murano glass seat designed by the architect Marco Piva and created by the Massimiliano Schiavon Art Team named Blow, it has been worked in accordance with the ancient art of Venetian glassblowers. Alongside Henraux, all of the protagonists involved are: Riva 1920, La Vallée, Helidon Xhixha, Marco Piva, Massimiliano Schiavon Art Team, Davide Oldani, Rilegno, Cantine Ferrari, Eataly, SCM GROUP, Conterno Giacomo.

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Various details of the Timeless table

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The Timeless table

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THE NEW HENRAUX SHOWROOM

In order to adapt to production needs determined by growing market demands and in reference to new programs and new commercial development strategies, Henraux is pleased to announce the implementation of an important corporate project which involves the restructuring and expansion of an existing building, a large warehouse built in 1973, which has undergone several changes over the years. It is a rectangular-shaped industrial structure with a vaulted roof, originally used for the second transformation of marble and the polishing and packaging of finished products. The work is part of a reorganization, qualification and strengthening plan for the vast corporate industrial complex in Querceta, started by Paolo Carli in the early 2000s and which has already profoundly transformed

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the historic company, making it more competitive and capable of facing large companies and the challenges of international markets. The project, prepared by the architect Enrico Carli, plans to build a workshop for finishing, pre-laying of finished products and packaging. It includes offices, showrooms, services and changing rooms for workers. The technical characteristics of the building, which has an area of over 1500 square meters, have been conceived to harmonise the most modern construction technologies with the aesthetic requirements that Henraux has imposed on other structures in its industrial complex: in the recently created showroom for the line of marble design products of “Luce di Carrara” brand, in the renovation of the old sawmill for the activities of the Henraux Foundation,

in the construction of the new company canteen. The project also provides for the construction of a new adjacent warehouse, on the south/east side of the existing building, a two-span single-storey building. It will be a structure of great aesthetic sense within which the display of processed products is expected. Whilst adhering to the existing building, on the north/west side, a multi-storey building will be added. The ground floor will consist of a central part, the showroom, which will develop on three levels, as well as a free space that will perform the function of an exhibition hall and filter area for the connection with the premises used for offices. Finally, on the opposite side, there will be a workshop for sculpture and product finishing.

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Render of the new Henraux showroom

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Render of the new Henraux showroom

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ISBN 9788894350234