Gae Aulenti was the most well-known Italian female architect of her generation. She planned residences, train stations, and museums, conceptualized exhibitions and showrooms, created stage sets for the theatre, and designed furniture and lamps. One of her areas of expertise was converting or repurposing historical buildings, the transformation of the Gare d’Orsay in Paris into a museum (1980–86) being one of her most famous projects.
In 1979, Gae Aulenti became FontanaArte’s new art director. As a product designer Aulenti had previously worked with glass, creating pieces such as Giova (1964) – a combined desk lamp and vase that was already part of FontanaArte’s product range. On one occasion, she was visiting FontanaArte’s factory and storage facilities in her new role as art director when she noticed the simple trolleys used to transport heavy glass panes. They consisted of no more than a single wooden board mounted on four wheels. Aulenti had the idea of replacing the wooden board with a thick glass panel to create a mobile coffee table. She chose a square, fifteen- millimetre-thick glass pane, had holes drilled into the edges, and mounted it on four rubber wheels which swivelled through 360 degrees. The nuts and bolts were intentionally left visible on the surface to emphasize the simple, industrial aesthetic of the table. This ready-made approach – using existing elements for a new design – can also be discerned in the works of other designers in the 1980s, such as Jasper Morrison, Ingo Maurer, and Stiletto. The coffeetable’s industrial style, however, is a common characteristic of 1970s and 1980s high-tech architecture as practised by architects such as Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
Text: Jochen Eisenbrand
