Where and when
Who
Annarita Briganti
Author
Sergio Risaliti
Artistic Director Museo Novecento
Marco Casamonti
Architect, designer and co-founder of the Archea Associati studio.
The Brilliant Architect, as male, as she liked to call herself, the Italian who made the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and who created many other works in Italy and abroad, the lioness, the aunt, the intellectual, the great lady. On Tuesday 15 November at 6:00pm the Museo Novecento presents as the first Florentine stop Gae Aulenti. Reflections and thoughts on the brilliant architect, the latest book by Annarita Briganti published by Cairo for the Backstage Series.
The meeting, in the presence of the author, will be mediated by Fiorella Minervino, journalist, art critic and historian, and Sergio Risaliti, Director of the Museo Novecento and Marco Casamonti, architect, designer and co-founder of the Archea Associati studio..
“You can’t do the same thing in San Francisco or Paris. A very careful analytical work is needed, before designing: studying history, literature, geography, even poetry and philosophy “declared Gae Aulenti, who knew the history of Florence well and had signed important interventions in the city fabric: in 1990 the entrance to the Santa Maria Novella station, in 1996 the square in front of the former Leopolda station and, finally, participation in the tender for the exit of the New Uffizi, later won by Isozaki.
A multifaceted personality, difficult to enclose in a single definition, Gae Aulenti was
among the few women of her time to have graduated from the Politecnico di Milano (she was born in 1927), and is a shining example of how it is possible to achieve oneself without ever losing the desire to love, to have a family, to explore, to create, from architecture to design, to theater. Hers is an Italian story, with an international flavor, which everyone should know. Nomad in DNA – she was born in the province of Udine from a father of Apulian origins and a Neapolitan-Calabrian mother, grew up between Veneto and Piedmont and moved to Milan in the mid-1970s – Gaetana Emilia Aulenti has traveled all over the world to renovate it , build it, set it up, make it more beautiful. In passionate pages, the author introduces us to her many faces and does so through the heritage that this great woman has left us: from piazzale Cadorna and from the International Exhibitions in the Triennale in her Milan (city where there is also a square entitled to her) at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, from the Leopolda in Florence to the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, from the subway in Naples to Palazzo Branciforte in Palermo, at the Musée d’Orsay, which earned her the Legion of Honor. A book that is the result of studies and research in the field, in the archives and in the media, with interviews with witnesses and with those who today carry on their artistic, cultural and “genre” heritage. To reflect on a fundamental concept: what does it mean to build and, given the times, to rebuild? To start dreaming big again, to be happy and to have a true equality.
Annarita Briganti
She is a journalist, writer and columnist. It deals in particular with major issues, with women, with culture in all its forms, with the fight against all types of discrimination. He collaborates with Repubblica, Robinson, with the other publications of the GEDI Group and with Donna Moderna. On television he participates in Mediaset talks. For Cairo he published the novels Don’t ask me how you were born (2014), Love is a fairy tale (2015) and What we don’t know (2018) and the essays Alda Merini. The heroine of chaos (2019) and Coco Chanel. A woman of our time (2021) awarded and protagonists of tours in Italy and abroad. She would like a more humane society.