BOOK LAUNCH #2
Tuesday 11 November
5pm â Guided tour by LĂ©a-Catherine Szacka, in French
6pm â Book Launch La Gae. Gae Aulenti (1927-2012), curated by Giovanni Agosti, Triennale Milano, 2025. Round Table with Nina Artioli, Nina Bassoli, Paola ViganĂČ, moderated by LĂ©a-Catherine Szacka
The volume, which has origin from the experience of the exhibition held between 2024 and 2025 at Triennale Milano, is an unpublished and surprising portrait of Gae Aulenti (1927-2012).
The exhibition and the book were created in collaboration with Archivio Gae Aulenti. The backbone consists of a chronology, which from 1927 to 2012 follows the architect in an uninterrupted interweaving of testimonies where personal and professional life are inextricably connected. The text is flanked, page after page, by a totally renewed iconography, the sequence of which follows step by step the thread of words, the coming on stage of projects, the making and unraveling of theatre plays, the opening and closing of construction sites. The juxtapositions with the protagonist change over the course of the pages: close-ups alternate with mass scenes, where she is only one element; zooming in is followed by bird flights, so that the chronological mesh loses its rigidity and gives way to insights. There are a chronology of the architect’s writings and a summary of the over eight hundred projects. Finally, the index of names transforms the book into a pilot book of culture, not just architecture, at the end of the twentieth century. In this cavalcade the genres, historiographical and literary, mix: and the figure of Gae Aulenti that emerges is very different from the one we think we know, through hearsay or clichĂ©s.
This event take place on the occasion of the exhibition Crossed Histories, Gae Aulenti, Ada Louise Huxtable, Phyllis Lambert, on Architecture and the City at Archizoom, curated by LĂ©a-Catherine Szacka.
BIOGRAPHIES
Nina Artioli is an architect, director of the Gae Aulenti Archive she has instituted in 2012 and founder of Tspoon, an architectural and urban design studio based in Rome, which operates through projects, installations, research and editorial initiatives.
Nina Bassoli (1983), architect, researcher and curator, is curator for Architecture, Urban Regeneration and Cities at Triennale Milano. She holds a PhD from IUAV University in Venice and a degree in architecture from Milan Polytechnic and she is member of the editorial board of «Lotus International».
Paola ViganĂČ, architect and urbanist, is Full Professor in Urban Theory and Urban Design at the EPFL (where she directs the Habitat Research Center and the Lab-U) and at IUAV Venice. She received the Grand Prix de lâUrbanisme in 2013, the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the UCLouvain in 2016 in the frame of âUtopia for our Timeâ, the Flemish Culture Award for Architecture in 2017, and the Golden medal to the career of Milano Triennale in 2018. Together with Bernardo Secchi, she founded Studio (1990-2014) working on numerous projects and visions in Europe. Since 2015, StudioPaolaViganĂČ works on the ecological and social transition of cities, landscapes and territories designing urban and territorial projects and realizing public spaces in Europe. In 2019, her work has been exhibited at the Shenzen Biennale and in 2021 at the Venice Biennale. In 2022, she receives the Schelling Prize for Architectural Theory.
Léa-Catherine Szacka is associate professor in architectural studies at the University of Manchester and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group. She has also been a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Harvard GSD, The Berlage, ETH, and EPFL. Since 2024, she has served as vice president of the European Architectural History Network. Szacka is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale(2016) and of Biennials/Triennials: Conversations on the Geography of Itinerant Display (2019). She is also co-author of Le Concert: Pink Floyd à Venise (2017) and Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture Between History, Politics and Media (2023), as well as co-editor of Mediated Messages (2018). In 2022, she co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.
