Italo Rota, the architect of the Museo del Novecento, dies – Corriere.it

2024-04-06 16:29:38

by PIERLUIGI PANZA

Planner and designer, he had volcanic ideas. He began working with Gregotti and Gae Aulenti at the Muse d’Orsay. He was 70 years old

architect Italo Rota died, he designed the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Piazza del Duomo in Milan. After graduating from the Polytechnic, he began working with Gregotti and with Gae Aulenti at the Muse d’Orsay. He was director of the New Academy of Fine Arts (Naba).

If I think of Italo Rota, the architect of the Museo del Novecento in Milan and of a hundred other projects, who died on April 6th, a friend for so many years, I see him one day after September 11th when we are going to the United States as a delegation to present his museum. And he, barefoot, dressed in a crimson overcoat down to his feet bought in India where he had just finished a sanctuary, is (obviously) stopped at the border among the suspects: Couldn’t you have put something else on, Italo?. The only thing to be suspicious of, however, were his volcanic ideas, extravagant at times (like the legendary Bagonghi, symbol of Milan), playful, free, what we always have to do with him…, you should do…. Lastly, the idea that drones will leave us food in the courtyards, or that containers will become mobile hospitals, that each citizen will leave his memorabilia in museums, like the one in Reggio Emilia…

After graduating from the Polytechnic, you began working with Gregotti and Aulenti at the Muse d’Orsay, which was also his creation. It’s easy to place him in Postmodernity, especially the one with more sequins – he is a man who collected the magazines of the Modern Movement, the gray Russian Constructivists, the toy soldiers. He was the architect of the stylist Roberto Cavalli, for whom he built a villa in Florence, shops with long moray eels and the Just Cavalli Caf, destination of an animalier Milan in which he did not participate because he loved staying at home with his cats , his wife (the set designer Margherita Palli) and cooking.

He participated in the history of the mutation from kitsch, to the fusion of genres to create a new vision of interiors. That of stylists is ephemeral architecture – she said – but a narrative vision, a catalog of inspirations. Creating, with architecture, a momentary happiness was his vision, often using – he was so apparently mystical and with a Japanese cultural attitude – a surplus of technology, of robotisation which he liked a lot.

Architecture was no longer that of the Long term, it might not even last the life of the architect: however, for Luca Ronconi he built an Etruscan style tomb that will be able to defy the millennia. He loved tailor-made homes for everyone, with extreme comfort to make people happy, a Jeff Koons-style architecture. He was director of Naba entirely oriented towards learning the trade by capturing the trends of the future. Designer, creative even more than old-fashioned architect, Rota was a councilor in the Formentini council (he was a convinced pro-European, in this a bit glocal like Philippe Daverio). For Expo he created the Kuwait Pavilion and at the Triennale, with Germano Celant, the Kitchen & Invaders exhibition on the power that food has in society, with ideas on the future of nutrition, but also the reconstruction of the cuisine of the Pope D’Annunzio with the list of favorite dishes. I have never understood how someone like that, dressed in that extravagant way, an elf who looked like a Sadu, with a great culture of the past, could be interested in high technological performances (as in the Elatech factories in Bergamo and SIT in Cusago, highly robotic), logistics, drones, digital, a kind of 3D Ganesh, a mad inventor who came out of some woods in Avalon. And then I don’t know how to say it, I think of his voice, so gentle, so devoid of hypocrisy, allergic to banality, so spontaneous, so precious, so fragile like a verse by Prevert.

April 6, 2024 (modified April 6, 2024 | 6:42 pm)

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