Central Image: Casa Mollino | artview.com

Turin is the principal landscape of the distinctive designer and architect Carlo Mollino. Perhaps this special place, with the rocky Alps as its background, where the Susa valley is divided by the river Po yet coexists with it and where -according to the mystics- magic triangles of black and white energy meet, influenced the idiosyncratic Italian. Maybe these contradictions created the absolute expression of the ideal human if Lewis Mumford described such a person in his book Art and Technics. A person who occupied themselves equally with art and technique, culminating in a single body of work that includes architecture, furniture, mirror, wallpaper and even automobile design, plenty of photography, a little bit of literature, ski, and, of course, aircraft demonstration flights.

Carlo Mollino | carlomollino.org

Carlo Mollino (1905-1973) manages to balance between all these potentially conflicting fields with mastery. He succeeds in combining his multiple interests -modernism, surrealism, egyptology and all the other references one can discern in his work- into a pulsating eclecticism. Whether one looks at the Fenis chair, with its curvilinear parts or the more tectonic Reale table, with its distinctive joints or again the Ardea chair - all still produced by Zanotta - one will note a living tension in these objects as if they were living creatures that have been fed by their references and depend on the wordy directions imposed by their creator.

Fenis chair | zanotta.it

Reale table | zanotta.it

Ardea chair | zanotta.it

Two pertinent examples of these tendencies in the work of the Italian designer are the interior spaces of Casa Miller and Casa Mollino. The first was a well-known residence in its time that received rather negative comments and the second a secret residence for himself that he kept hidden from relatives and friends, which followed the opposite course and is now a museum open to the public.

Tabletop | domusweb.it

Casa Miller | pinimag.com

Casa Miller | domusweb.it

Casa Miller is an interior that harmoniously encompasses all interiors - childhood and old age, the contemporary and memory, the erotic and modesty. It’s loaded with numerous horizontal surfaces, too many to be able to sit on them, too many to lie down on, with too many surreal mirrors with feminine contours - the most famous being that of Aphrodite of Milos - with rubber gloves on glass partitions, like paintings of his friend De Chirico, initiating an insatiable pattern of spontaneous associations, transforming conventional reality into a fictional reality. The basic laws of perspective are defied through mirrors and glasses in the spaces of the residence and new interpretations of the things themselves emerge as a crack is created in the conception of everyday objects and practices through their architecture and design.

Casa Miller | domusweb.it

Casa Miller | domusweb.it

The other residence, Casa Mollino, evokes the Wunderkammern even more, strewn inside with all the favourite objects of the composer. It is located on the border of the city on the side of the river. Inside there are zebra rugs, sculptures of legs and horse heads, accompanied by flowers that bear shells instead of blossoms. It looks more like a memory palace whose owner has carefully placed objects in their places to get inspired by them and unravel their history so as to not forget their company, together with a residence that existed in the everyday “here and now”, once upon a time. Casa Mollino has carefully compiled traces of its creator. The architect tries to disappear into the appearances in this space, which is entirely his own and for his occasional guests. Nude photographs decorate one wall of a room and painted butterflies a wall in another room, whose bed is shaped like a boat as if it were an essay on the passage of time and its final destination by the river.

Casa Mollino | artview.com

Casa Mollino | nssmag.com

It is clear that he was not a conventional designer but a figure who played with the boundaries between different forms of art and who probably ignored them or did not take them into account because of the same need, as he describes, felt by any person who has the awareness and dignity of a human being; he wanted to be enchanted and to enchant, to express himself.

Gallery Photos: Casa Mollino | dagospia.com, Milo mirror | tumblr.com