Architect n. fem. sing.

Visionary, eclectic, and irretrievably cross-cutting (multidisciplinary). Through the professional and personal stories of these women who, with charisma and strong identity, were courageous pioneers, from the post-war years onwards, in a world perceived only as masculine, we discover how their female sensitivity added value to design, enabling them to create daringly and assert Italianness throughout the world.

CURATORIAL TEXT

This showcase tells the stories of women who inhabited and transformed design with radical intelligence at a time when the architectural profession was still strongly marked by patriarchal logic. With five documentaries, a mosaic of singular experiences is formed, in which the female status is never subordinate, but becomes a generating force for vision, method, and language.

These are intimate and powerful portraits, in which being a woman becomes a tool with which to break away and differentiate, in a world that confined women to marginal roles (in a world that still confines women to the roles of mother, wife, and daughter). The stars of these films were conscious creators and central figures in the architectural culture – and beyond – of the 20th Century. Their approach is cultured and interdisciplinary, open to cross-fertilization with other knowledge – art, fashion, theater, and graphic design – and resistant to specialization: a complex, mobile way of thinking that can produce unconventional connections and visions.

The postwar period was the era in which these voices made themselves heard: a time of rebuilding and desire for emancipation, when envisaging the future became a necessary act.

There was Gae Aulenti, a nonconformist, charismatic, cultured, and multidisciplinary architect, whose talents extended from museum, theatre design and urban planning to designing iconic projects like the Musée d’Orsay. Today, her archive-home provides us with an intense and vital image of her vision of the world.

There was Cini Boeri, pupil to Ponti and Zanuso, as well as a bold and lucid designer, who centered her research on the freedom of living. Her modular furniture and domestic architecture express independence, care, and modernity, applying function from a humanist perspective.

There was Lina Bo Bardi, a militant and poetic spirit, who transformed architecture into a collective gesture. An Italian-Brazilian architect on a free and fearless trajectory, her Oficina – a space for work, research, and imagination – was a physical place symbolizing a practice that could speak to the social fabric, weaving together art, politics, and beauty.

There was Rosanna Monzini, a leading figure in postwar Milan, a pupil and collaborator to Gio Ponti, with experience in the Rinascente in her most legendary years. An elegant functionalist, she was a master in the styling of simple, modern, unpredictable, and elegant Milanese flats.

Four singular architects, a single, cross-cutting perspective: that of those who, with radicalism and intelligence, reinvented the way we think about spaces.