Carlo Mollino (Turin, 1905-73) was an architect who committed equally to art and to technique, embodying the figure of the Italian Renaissance polymath in the context of modernity.
He was a sportsman and a cultured intellectual, besides designing buildings, interiors, and furniture, he was a photographer, a writer, a skier, an aerobatic pilot, and a professor at the Polytechnic of Turin.
In the 1930s he was among the very few architects, internationally speaking, to introduce elements of Surrealist art and culture into the Modern Movement. Free from any rigid ideological position, he went on to define a synthetic form of eclecticism that prefigured the contemporary.
Taking nature as a source for both engineering and harmonious beauty, Mollino was essentially in search of lightness and dynamism, qualities he animatedly infused into his organic architecture and furniture.
An innate pleasure for storytelling colored every aspect of his work:
“Anyone who is not a beast and therefore has the awareness and dignity of a human being, the poorest human being who has never reneged on his own individuality, will feel this need: to be enchanted and to enchant, to express himself.”[^]
Museo Casa Mollino