AHEAD OF THE MILANESE SCHOOL

摘要

In a freshly liberated Italy, Carlo Mollino called for architects to interpret the concept of personal freedom, quite the opposite of that being promoted by the national political culture and a freedom not bound to consumptions but to a revolution in social customs that would begin with a different use of the domestic space. Although a great admirer of Le Corbusier, collecting everything he wrote, Mollino never organised his own vision within a theoretical and dogmatic framework, much less a functionalist one1. He worked in particular on the theme of the closed living room, a type in its own right that Mollino researched in the 1930s for his own spaces - and those of his clients -in his quest to block out the outside world (from State politics and from nature). After 1943, this turned into the versatile room "without kitchen"2 exhibited in New York, Chicago and San Francisco in the "Italy at Work" exhibition of 1950-1951. This room-type immediately and surprisingly revealed how effectively Mollino's furnishings symbolised Italian design, revealing its potential as a trend that could help channel Italian taste and consumptions abroad, especially in the home of the Marshall Plan.