Fondazione Franco Albini

Franco Albini

Architect-Designer | Magenta | The period after World War II

Biography

An important figure of rationalist thought in Italy, at first he concentrated on low-cost housing with R. Camus and G. Palanti, and on experimentation in the field of exhibit design, at the Triennale and the Fair. During the postwar period he designed, among other works, the Palazzo Bianco (1949-51) and Palazzo Rosso (1952-61) museums in Genoa, La Rinascente department store in Rome (1957-61) and the Metropolitana Milanese subway (1962-69). He created a number of icons of design, such as the Veliero bookcase and the Luisa armchair (Compasso d’Oro 1955). Starting in 1952, he always worked in collaboration with Franca Helg.

Milan was changing, quickly, continuously. On 4 May 1957 the Metropolitana Milanese company (the subway authority), began its first worksite, on Viale Monte Rosa. Amidst “healing pick-axes,” urban plans from the fascist era, bombing, postwar reconstruction, new housing districts and subway lines under construction Milan, in your period, was not a city but an infinite, boundless construction site. It was a display of pride, the proving ground of a populace that seemed to be able to move in unison. Rather than the static image of the historical center, the Milanese identified with the dynamism of the “rising city.” They wanted to live in a capital that could look with pride upon the world. The working-class city and the bourgeois city felt like parts of one, single project. Construction everywhere, from near the cathedral all the way to the extreme boundaries of the Corpi Santi. And what held it all together, like the thread that holds the pearls, was precisely the construction of the subway system. Which, however, was still without a soul. You took care of that, together with Franca Helg and Bob Noorda. At the start you did a small job of image consulting. That wasn’t enough for you. You thought projects should be bounced on your knees, like a child. They needed nurturing, to find the right meaning. You had to invent an underground landscape that would not be oppressive, to give a skin, the most extensive sensory organ, to a work of social architecture of daunting size.

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Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Marcel Breuer in visita a Murano, 1952

This was your most outstanding monument to democracy. Anti-rhetorical, anti-stylistic, made with innovative, industrial, replicable, homogeneous, recognizable materials. No set of all different stations to indulge the architect’s fantasies. You were looking, as always, for elegance in the details: prefabricated Silipol facing panels to form the interspace for the physical plant systems, floors in tiles of black bubble-top rubber, serizzo ghiandone for the stairs, railings in painted tubing. Bob Noorda was a Dutchman who had studied with Gerrit Rietveld. You two had no problems understanding each other when you coordinated the graphics, the image, the characters, the symbols and colors. A dark, vibrant orange. “La rossa” was the nickname the Milanese gave to their subway line. It was your third Compasso d’Oro prize. The first for Noorda, who after “la rossa” was called in to redesign the signage of the subway systems of New York and São Paulo, taking your method out into the world.

When the red line was opened you had already been teaching in Venice for fifteen years, brought there by Giuseppe Samonà. Your colleagues there were Giancarlo De Carlo, with whom you joked at lunch, or Carlo Scarpa who kept on talking just as much as you kept silent. But ’68 came five years early in Milan. The kids at the Polytechnic wanted you, Franco, you couldn’t help but listen. Over the years you put up with the confusion, the “inferno” the Polytechnic had become, the unreasonable suspension ordered in 1971 by the Ministry of Education (though you were in good company: Ludovico Belgiojoso, Piero Bottoni, Guido Canella, Aldo Rossi, Carlo De Carli, Vittoriano Viganò, even the dean Paolo Portoghesi). But in ‘64 you knew you had to return to Milan. To teach those young people your meticulous, headstrong method, that of an artisan from Brianza. Your human and design ethic. As you were doing with your son, who took part in the protests at the department in those years, and as you were doing with that student from Genoa who worked evenings in your studio. He has always acknowledged you as his mentor, the only one he ever really had. For him, yours was “a school of patience.” Years later, he would win a competition in Paris for a cultural center at the Beaubourg. His name is Renzo Piano.

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