In the center, the Parigi armchair, a 1989 masterpiece designed for UniFor, and the Piroscafo sideboard, dated 1992, two icons of the collaboration between Aldo Rossi and the Molteni Group. All around are the furniture, drawings, documents, and visual and written records that defined this profound communion of purpose, materials from the Molteni Museum collections and company archives.
It is precisely the Group Museum, inside the Giussano headquarters, that hosts the exhibition “Un legno geniale – Aldo Rossi and the Molteni Group,” a tribute to the creativity of the architect, winner of the 1990 Pritzker Prize, and to their enduring relationship that continued uninterruptedly from ’79 to ’97. And today witnessed by the review of “furniture or architecture” on display, as Rossi considered them, “not built for fashion.”
Their eternal relevance and imperishable appeal emerge clearly from the display designed by Ron Gilad with the scientific collaboration of the Aldo Rossi Foundation, an itinerary imagined to tell the autobiographical, lyrical and playful thought Rossi devoted to each piece. Vintage editions of designs that are still in production stand alongside recent reissues or pieces that are still out of print, but always present in the company’s memory and in the collections of the Molteni Museum.
Thus, the Capitolo series (Molteni&C, 1982-1988), the Carteggio secretaire (Molteni&C, 1987), the Cartesio modular system (UniFor, 1994) and the Consiglio table (UniFor, 1991), to represent the “catalog of architectural elements” underlying the architect’s design. Others, however, express their author’s more poetic thinking, such as the Milano chair (Molteni&C, 1987), which draws on the memory of classical seating. Until the cabinet/sculpture Cabina dell’Elba, presented at the Salone del Mobile in ’80, which marked the beginning of the 20-year collaboration between the Molteni Group companies and the great master, brought to Giussano by his friend Luca Meda, then art director of Molteni&C.
The “genius” of Aldo Rossi and his wooden architectures finds further demonstration in this exhibition, the title of which refers directly to a quote by Rossi and his text published in the volume AR 90, Molteni&C, Giussano 1990: “When I design a piece of furniture, I always remember that strange piece of wood that could become a piece of furniture, then was destined to be a puppet, and finally became Pinocchio. Of course it was an ingenious piece of wood, but it is not excluded that these things happen.”
