Carlo Mollino
Only in 1933 he began his personal career winning a competition for the construction of an office building in Cuneo[1] and writing "The Life of Oberon", a fictional short story published in the architectural magazine Casabella.
[5] The direct contact with Expressionism had a lasting impact on his architectural design as can already be seen in the first building he completed, the Farmers' Federation in Cuneo (Sede Federazione Agricoltori, 1933–35).
It is with this manifesto, which bears traces of Futurism for which he had a youthful infatuation,[7] that Mollino symbolically began a creative journey in which he would consistently combine a dual role as architect and storyteller.
In 1934 Mollino began to explore Surrealism,[8] a movement that remained a constant source of fascination throughout his life, publishing in August his second short story, The Duke’s Lover (L’amante del duca, 1934–36), a dreamlike fiction whose protagonist is the imaginary architect Faust.The Horse Riding Club of Turin (Società Ippica Torinese, 1937–40), is Mollino's first masterpiece and his first opportunity to give shape to a modern surrealist architecture that extended his interior designs and furniture completed in the 1930s in order to “move the concepts of surreal interior space towards an intransigently functional unity".
Its structure is made up of cutting-edge Vierendeel trusses integrated with a traditional interlocking log enclosure; Mollino thus created an extraordinarily dynamic and three-dimensional building.
The building, which he himself defined as a "flying chalet", is inspired by the traditional Walser alpine architecture that Mollino studied[13] in the summer of 1930 and for which he produced remarkably analytical drawings.
In 1952 he designed the Casa Cattaneo on a site overlooking the Lake Maggiore; the two-story house is composed of a long stretching cantilevered beam supported at one end by two leg-shaped pillars, resembling an animal crouching on the lawn slope, ready to jump.
The death of his father in December 1953 threw Mollino into a personal crisis that eventually led him to abandon his architectural practice for several years in favour of other activities such as automobile design, flying aerobatics and nude photography.
On the one hand, he focuses mainly on female portraits, more rarely on images of interiors and skis, signing his unique prints as fine artworks, and publishing and exhibiting them in photographic shows.
[19] These portraits[20] are formally close to the dreamlike and refined shots of Man Ray and Erwin Blumenfeld, although enriched with literary quotes and architectural settings of his design.
This body of work is particularly interesting since photography, also thanks to the systematic use of retouching and photomontage techniques, becomes the tool for accomplishing his idea of architecture while emphasizing its surrealist component.
For this purpose, he rented the annex of Villa Scalero on the beautiful Turin hillside while he set about choosing and purchasing a large amount of women's clothing and accessories.
Once again, he redesigned the interior space in which he set up his studio and – while continuing to buy large amounts of 1960s female clothing and lingerie – pioneered the use of the Polaroid camera.
