I would like to retell the story of Carlo Mollino. Mollino grew up in Torino and his father, Eugenio Mollino, was an engineer. Eugenio raised Carlo as an engineer. It’s important to know that Mollino’s father built around 500 buildings throughout his life so Carlo was unbelievably rich. Mollino was born very gifted. When he was in his first year of Elementary School, Mollino drew the section of the cylinder of the engine of a car from memory. So it was clear that he was much more advanced than his classmates. In the same notebook, he produced another drawing which represents the section of a camera with the levers needed to make the shutter function.

While he was alive, the life of Mollino was not well understood because Mollino himself knew that he was out of the ordinary. Furthermore, during his life he never spoke about himself, he never explained his work and he never introduced his friends to each other. When speaking with someone who knew him; they told me that he was very tight with money and never offered a single coffee to anybody in his entire life. But speaking with others, they told me that Mollino was very generous and would offer champagne to everybody. This contradiction perfectly depicts the life of Mollino. The only way to understand Mollino’s vision for his life is through a letter which is preserved in the Mollino archive in the Polytechnic of Torino, where there are around 20,000 pieces of paper, including photos, drawings, letters, documents, agendas and so on.

He wrote to a friend: “I am doing this so that people will try to find me where I am not.”

Mollino took thousands of portraits of women who were more or less naked. However this work has to be seen not in terms of eroticism but in a totally different way which we will see at the end of the visit. The first strange thing about the life of Mollino is concerning his profession because even though his father built 500 buildings, Mollino himself built only 7 in a city which grew twice in size within his lifetime. But if you look at these 7 buildings together, they look like they were built by 7 different architects. In fact, it’s impossible to recognise a distinct Mollino style.

While the Theatre Reggio was being built Mollino conceived the idea of the theatre like a space in which every night art is born. Because every night there is representation of a story or music or something that was invented by an artist. For us humans, birth comes from the feminine womb so the theatre is a section like a feminine body hosting the perpetual birth of art. This is the real reason why the building is shaped like a corset, but is not at all sexual.

When you are inside the theatre you are lost in the space, because everything is rounded in every direction and there are no corners, as though you have entered a very big egg. This sensation of losing yourself in the space is magnified by the lighting system which was invented by Gino Sarfatti. Sarfatti invented a never seen before lighting system made of hundreds of bulbs freely suspended in between thousands of pieces of plexiglass. The cross section of a piece of the plexiglass is a star and in fact they are prisms. The light is captured inside the prism and refracted internally, provoking millions of dots of light with varying intensities. If you move yourself, everything moves around you as the lighting changes.

Exactly from 1960, Mollino rented this apartment. He completely destroyed the interior and this is the only original ceiling remaining. As you can see it’s a little rounded with a frame while all the others are flat and have a different height. In 1968 the apartment was finished exactly as you can see now.

This is the most surreal interior that Mollino created in his entire life and this is Casa Devalle which was completed in 1940. The final result is a photo in which you can see the real interior but you can’t understand anything because Mollino is showing us through photography the content of surrealism: the vision or the dream.

In 1948 he was commissioned to build a kind of resort in Cervinia. To help sell the apartments, Mollino agreed to design a table, bed and chair which was used to furnish the entire building. This is the unique case in which Mollino designed some furniture without knowing his final client.

Now I will show you a totally different work which Molino produced in 1950 by bending plywood. These are two unique chairs in which the plywood starts from the back of the chair, down forming the back legs, then going up to support the seat, then down again, uncut, then up and making the seat: “continuous plywood” Molino wrote. This structure is very complex and I tried to make the model of it with a piece of paper but I found that it’s impossible to build this chair because the plywood crosses itself. It took some years to understand the construction; there was a negative mould in solid wood and the plywood did not exist yet. The layers were glued on to the mould, the mould was continuously modified and the plywood continued to follow the shape of the mould. This is very similar to the construction of a rollercoaster; you cross yourself many times but the rail is continuous.

I told you that Mollino was first an engineer and secondly an artist but he was also a very cultivated man. He educated himself on all the ancient cultures and civilisations. Like every cultivated Italian; starting with Greek, and following with studies of the Chinese, Japanese and Egyptian civilisations. Very often in the Mollino works there are symbols. Sometimes they are visual and sometimes they are invisible content within his projects.

Now I will show you another work which Mollino did in 1936 when he invented a lighting system made with an electrical rail which runs in a curved line across the entire ceiling.

On it is hung a ceiling lamp made with 4 adjustable shades and a counterweight which allows you to move the light to the height and position which you want. This is something out of the ordinary for the time, but the real content of this lighting system is a hidden symbol: specifically a Greek symbol.

The first thing which happened in Molino’s life that had no relation to architecture was his interest in skiing. In 1930 , aged 25, he was taken to ski in the mountains for the first time. Skiing as we know today did not exist at all because there were no ski lifts or villages for tourists. The style of skiing at the time was the telemark technique. Mollino understood that with his knowledge of engineering and physics he could produce something better and after the war in exactly 1950, his book concerning the new technique of skiing invented by Mollino was published in Rome. Mollino the engineer introduced, with this clear drawing in the first page of his book, what is it the ski; according to Mollino, skiing consists of moving the weight of the body from the top of a hill down and depending on the obstacles in front of the skier, he can choose one of many different trajectories. Mollino immediately became a master of skiing and this is a photo of Mollino skiing in the 30s. The book is made with hundreds of drawings which are diagrams. The human body also becomes a diagram; drawn only with three lines. When we are skiing only 3 parts of the body are moving. Using this method, Mollino is teaching us what we have to do with our bodies in a very clear way. The man who is demonstrating the new technique of skiing invented by Mollino was one of his closest friends; Leo Gasperl. The man was the fastest skiier in the world.

After the publication of the book Mollino was much less interested in Skiing. In 1953, a friend of Mollino, a rich pharmacist living in Torino bought a car - an Oscar. Mollino’s friend was very skilled in driving cars, as was Mollino. As you can see in this image; the Oscar was invented by the Maserati brothers, so this was a very avant-garde car. And here you can see Mollino himself with the Alfa Romeo Zagato, which was a very important sports car. Mollino and his friend Mario Damonte were both very skilled drivers and they were participating in races and rallies. In 1953, Damonte participated in the 24 hour Le Mans race without Mollino. In the Mollino archives we found this cut out from a newspaper in which we can see Mario with his car, celebrating his win. The Oscar became the most affordable car in existence. Because the race was not really a race but a test of endurance. Mollino started to retouch the cut out image of the car, because he believed that if this was the best car in existence then he could do something better.

In fact at the time, cars were achieving a speed of almost 300km per hour but the radiator was placed vertically at the front of the body creating a strong aerodynamic break. So the logical step in continuing the development of racing cars was to improve the aerodynamics of the body of the car. So Mollino started retouching and airbrushing the photos of the Oscar and he added a kind of nose to the car. Obviously the car couldn’t function without a radiator. So he thought of an aerodynamic shape and later drew the same car without doors and without lights, while really only considering the shape.

And through this drawing you can clearly see that he was trying to reduce the volume of the car. Following several technical projects, this is the final product. You can see in the drawing that the car becomes a kind of catamaran in which one part of the body hosts the pilot and the other, the engine. These two parts of the body are connected with the radiator, in relation to the rest of the car, placed in a lower position. The car was unique and therefore handmade by hammering together aluminium sheets. That was in 1954 and in 1955 the Mollino racing car participated in the 24 Le Mans race. All the technical drawings for the development of the car are made my Mollino. They are 1.5m in size and you can see that Molino was a real engineer.

You have to know that very often Mollino was drawing freehand using Indian ink, you can’t make any mistakes because you can’t erase anything in the drawing. Mollino was able to invent in the meantime two different project, drawing them simultaneously on two different pieces of paper. 

Now I will show you just two inventions within the Mollino car. The first one is concerning the breaks because at the time disk breaks did not exist so creating an efficient way to slow the car down was a problem to be solved. In order to solve this problem Mollino derived his ideas from the most sophisticated breaks in existence at the time which were the ones used by planes during landing. These breaks were not breaks on the wheels, which would in fact burn immediately but they were the flaps on the wings of the plane, which instead created an aerodynamic break. The central part of Mollino’s car was cut and it becomes a flap. You can see in the drawing that the flap is in the process of being raised and is totally vertical. Secondly, the body of the car became so thin that Mollino couldn’t fit inside. So he transformed the round steering wheel to have a flat bottom allowing him to get inside car. Every racing car today has this kind of steering wheel designed by Mollino 60 years ago. After this car Molino had no more projects with cars in his life.

Mollino’s involvement in planes started at the beginning of his life because his father was administrating a company which produced planes in Torino. You can see two photos of Mollino - young and old - with two different planes. He was interested in the mechanical components of the planes and there are studies for patenting parts of the plane. In1962 he designed a plane for acrobatic flying and an acrobatic school for a company based in Naples. Unfortunately the company never produced the plane which was full of new inventions.

Mollino was not interested in conventional flying which was boring for him, but in air acrobatics. The Mollino Archive is full of drawings of air acrobatics. Just to let you know Mollino’s position in this field, I will tell you that Mollino was chosen to represent Italy in an international competition in Budapest in 1962. We don’t know about the final results of this competition because there are no records. But just after the competition, the chief of the acrobatic patrol of the Italian state who was the best acrobatic jet pilot we had in Italy, while Mollino was flying with a propellor, wrote to Mollino in a letter; “Let me tell you that it was not possible to have made a better choice.” This means that Mollino was considered the best acrobatic pilot in Italy in 1962.

The only field that Mollino cared for in his entire life was photography. As with most of the interests he had in his life; his knowledge came from his father. Because his father had set up a dark room in the big villa in which they were living in Rivoli. So when Mollino was child, he could open a door and behind it he was able to find everything he needed for photography. But the first official step which he took was when he rented a small apartment here in Torino. He designed the interior in quite a strange way. This apartment was named by Mollino; Casa Miller - a fantasy name - which he had for only 7 years because in 1943 Mollino closed this apartment. In this interior Mollino was shooting women, men and the interior itself. But why was Mollino now acting as an artist photographer? As usual, Mollino never explained the new situation. But we know what he was doing because sometimes he was exhibiting or publishing his photographs. The final prints were often quite big - 40x60cm and hand printed in black and white by Mollino. We found among the Mollino photos a kind of key to understanding what he was doing in this portrait where you can see Mollino sleeping. It’s an self-portrait taken in the entrance of Casa Mollino. Mollino looks like he is sleeping. But in fact he is doing something totally different because he understood very well what Freud theorised which is that the real content of our life is in our unconscious. In fact is it driving us in love or what we like which we can’t explain, but we like it.

So Mollino is not at all sleeping - he is dreaming.

Because the argument is that “I am here but in front of me is another me, but that me is not me”. This signifies reality and dreams and this is the world in which surrealists are dreaming. Mollino was not interested in being a surrealist artist, but this is the world in which Mollino is prepared his photos. Photos which are never a simple portrait of a woman or a document of the interior; there is always a story hidden in the photograph. I will show you this example; this woman is standing with a plaster capital which is exactly coinciding with her body. The capital is a symbol of architecture. This means that architects have to speak the same language as humans.

The portrait is not in the centre on the print because on the left side there is a shadow. The 360 degree portrait represents the visible and the invisible. But now in more depth we can go back to the ceiling lamp containing the greek symbol. In this picture you can see that the centre of the picture is the curving lamp and the head of an eagle cast in bronze. Apparently this eagle is a decoration, but Mollino is an engineer and he never produced decorations in his life. So it has to be considered a symbol.

In 1943 his photography ended forever but in the meantime Mollino wrote one of the most important books on photography. The title is: Message from the Darkroom. And finally Mollino explained something to us. He introduced the book with a little history of photography so we know where we are.

In the beginning he makes comparisons with painting. Because painting is art and photoplay which is conducted with a mechanical object and can’t be art. He explained that the artist photographer has in his hands a new tool and with this new tool he can open new doors. He can invent new art. So photography is an occasion to allow us to understand something which painters could never show us. The models can go away and the painter has the image in front of him and he can paint when he wants. In the text Mollino is talking about the practical problems of photography and there is an entire chapter dedicated to the critique of the photographic aesthetic, which is different from the critique of the painting aesthetic.

There is an entire chapter dedicated to Man Ray. This ends with more than 300 plates of photographers from all over the world through which Mollino is showing us everything that you can do with a camera. There are historical, fashion, advertising, architectural, chronicle, feminine nude, photos of Mollino himself and photos by Man Ray. The book was published in 1949. After the publication of the book Mollino never wrote another word about photography for the rest of his life.

This is just the first paragraph of the history of Mollino’s photography because up until the 50s Mollino photographed women wearing clothes, and then from the 50s onwards he started photographing women naked. From the beginning of the 50s Mollino rented another apartment like he did before with Cash Miller, redesigning the interior in a much simpler way and he totally changed the way through which he was preparing his artwork - focusing only on women.

For the rest of his life Mollino photographed only women inside this interior named Villa Scallero using a Leica camera and he did this only during the night. Mollino didn’t sign any photos and second that the portraits are printed in standard size, very often very carefully retouched and this means that Mollino is not making art because they are not signed but he was spending a lot of time obtaining materials which he was keeping secret.

Mollino never spoke about these photographs, never exhibited or published them and this is a big mystery in Mollino’s activities. We know also that every dress, underwear, shoes, jewels, wigs were owned my Mollino, not by the model so we can consider that every photo is a project in which everything is in Mollino’s hands.

In May 1973 Mollino died in his studio from a heart attack. It was found that he had no heirs and that he was living in 4 different houses in the same city. The big family apartment in which he lived in for his entire life, the studio of his father in another place in which he was woking alone, the villa for the shoots; Villa Zaira and this apartment.

All of Mollino’s belongings became property of the Italian state and an engineer from that Italian state came to this apartment to make an inventory of everything to be subsequently sold. The engineer was a clever person and while he was doing his work he was able to rent the apartment because Mollino was dead and the apartment was available. When he had the contract for the apartment signed in to his hands he stopped the sale of interior objects saying that he will be here and everything still in the apartment was of interest to him and in fact he bought the apartment with everything still inside.