I Am a Designer

Courageous pioneers of design (and, more often than not, of architecture as well), these women, with their boundless creativity, have helped define a modern and effortless style of living by designing iconic pieces that are sophisticated yet strikingly simple, playing with tradition, everyday life, art, and—above all—their passion for the creative process, while also redesigning interiors, stores, and museums as well as objects and furnishings.

CURATORIAL TEXT

This showcase tells the stories of women who have shaped and transformed design with radical intelligence, at a time when the design profession was still heavily influenced by male-dominated thinking.
Through these documentaries, a collage of their unique experiences—so diverse in terms of vision, method, and language—takes shape.
These are intimate and powerful portraits in which the very fact of being a woman becomes a tool for breaking the mold and standing out in a world that relegated women to marginal and traditional roles. The protagonists of these films, however, were self-aware creators—central figures in 20th-century design culture.
Their approach is sophisticated and interdisciplinary, open to contamination with other fields of knowledge—art, fashion, theater, graphic design—and resistant to specialization: a complex, fluid way of thinking, capable of generating unconventional connections and visions.
The postwar period is when these voices came to the fore: a time of reconstruction and a desire for emancipation, when imagining the future—even through objects—became a necessary act.

There is Gae Aulenti, a nonconformist, charismatic, cultured, and multidisciplinary architect capable of spanning museum exhibitions, theater, and urban planning—she devoted herself passionately to design. Some of her pieces remain iconic, such as the Pipistrello lamp for Martinelli and the Table with Wheels for Fontanarte. Among the awards she received was the Japan Imperial Prize. Today, her home-archive offers us a vivid and vibrant glimpse into her worldview.

Then there is Cini Boeri, a student of Ponti and Zanuso, a bold and lucid designer who made the freedom of living the focus of her work. Her modular furniture, such as the Streap series, and her residential architecture speak of autonomy, care, and modernity, interpreting function through a humanistic lens.

There are Adelaide Acerbi and Antonia Astori, respectively the visual and design soul of the Driade brand: the former the architect of its corporate identity, the latter the designer of refined and visionary systems capable of blending rigor and poetry, order and chaos. Through them, Driade has become a symbol of a sophisticated and international design aesthetic.

There is Franca Helg, a rigorous and quiet architect, a key figure in Italian Rationalism and a long-standing collaborator of Franco Albini. In her work, which spans architecture, exhibition design and industrial design, the project embodies moderation, precision and social responsibility. Objects and spaces emerge from an ethical and functional approach, capable of combining formal restraint with a deep attention to function, making a decisive contribution to the definition of a modern and timeless aesthetic.

Then there is Nanda Vigo, artist, designer and architect, a radical pioneer of experimentation at the intersection of art and design. Closely associated with the kinetic and programmed art movements, she made light a primary design material, capable of transforming space into a perceptual and sensory experience. Her environments and objects transcend the distinction between function and vision, proposing an idea of inhabiting a space as a journey, a perception, an immersion.

Then there is Lina Bo Bardi, a militant yet poetic spirit who transformed architecture into a collective gesture. An Italian-Brazilian architect with a free-spirited and intrepid career, whose ‘Oficina’ – a space for work, research and imagination – is both a physical and symbolic site of a practice that spoke to the social fabric, weaving together art, politics and beauty.

Seven remarkable female architects, a single cross-cutting perspective: that of those who, with rigour, passionate pragmatism and intelligence, have reinvented the very way we live through furnishings and objects.