Carlo Mollino, Cascina, Torino, Italy, 1943
Carlo Mollino, Cascina, Torino, Italy, 1943
Architect Carlo Mollino was born in 1905 and trained at the Polytechnic in Turin, where he graduated in 1931.
Invited by the magazine “Domus” in 1943 Carlo Mollino created a bedroom in a rice field. It can be interpreted as an extraordinary, ironic and anti-civic machine to sleep. On the minimum of surface stability, dominates a bed with white and light blue curtains which are fixed on thin timber-slats. It seems like a sort of balloon blocked up in a cubical surrounding. It is furnished and equipped to be fully independent. Even the exterior is excluded, only visible through a setting up rear mirror. The practical and psychological aspects of the project according to its creator are to “find oneself isolated in shut in a cocoon of foam but at the same time to have the possibility to look into the world”. The same hypothesis of dividing a room – in a house in the middle of a rice field – is not by incidence but necessary to capture the spirit of the Po-Valley where the atmosphere seems to look almost like dust – as the curtains are referring to. It continues to be an interior in an interior where everything gathers itself like the imagination in a body: to be inside is equivalent to be in a spider’s net and to wait for the world’s happenings to be caught in. To conclude, Mollino seems to have reinvented a typology of the past – a bed with independent curtains – and referring to it as his heritage of surrealistic images.
References