Artist of the day: Artist of the day, February 14, 2020: Gae Aulenti, an Italian architect, industrial, exhibition, graphic, stage, lighting, and interior designer (#917)

Gae Aulenti (1927 – 2012) was a prolific Italian architect, whose work spans industrial and exhibition design, furniture, graphics, stage design, lighting, and interior design. She was well known for several large-scale museum projects, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (1980–86) with ACT Architecture, the Contemporary Art Gallery at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the restoration of Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1985–86), and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco with HOK (firm) (2000–2003). Aulenti was one of the few women designing in the postwar period in Italy, where Italian designers sought to make meaningful connections to production principles beyond Italy. This avant-garde design movement blossomed into an entirely new type of Italian architecture, one full of imaginary utopias leaving standardization to the past.

Aulenti's deep involvement in the Milan design scene of the 1950s and 1960s formed her into an architect respected for her analytical abilities to navigate metropolitan complexity no matter the medium. Her conceptual development can be followed in the design magazine Casabella, to which she contributed regularly.[2]

A native of Palazzolo dello Stella, Gaetana Aulenti studied to be an architect at the Milan School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University and graduated in 1954 as one of two women in a class of 20.

Aulenti began her career as a private-practicing architect and freelance designer out of Milan in 1954. Branching into written publication, Aulenti joined the editorial staff at the design magazine Casabella-Continuità from 1955 until 1965 as an art director, doing graphic design work, and later served on the board of directors for the renamed Lotus International magazine.

Aulenti taught at Venice School of Architecture as an assistant instructor in architectural composition from 1960 to 1962 and at the Milan School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University from 1964 to 1967. With these experiences, she became a visiting lecturer at congresses and professional institutions in Europe and North America from 1967 onwards.

In 1981, she was chosen to turn the 1900 Beaux-Arts Gare d'Orsay train station, a spectacular landmark originally designed by Victor Laloux, into the Musée d’Orsay, a museum of mainly French art from 1848 to 1915. Her work on the Musée d’Orsay led to commissions to create a space for the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the restoration of the Palazzo Grassi as an art museum in Venice; the conversion of an old Italian embassy in Berlin into an Academy of Science; and the restoration of a 1929 exhibition hall in Barcelona as Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. In San Francisco, she transformed the city’s Beaux Art Main Library into a museum of Asian art.

Aulenti also occasionally worked as a stage designer for Luca Ronconi, including for Samstag aus Licht (1984). She also planned six stores for the fashion designer Adrienne Vittadini, including one on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. She even designed the mannequins.

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