Getting Her Due Recognition

American project showcases talents of veteran Italian female architect Gaetana Aulenti

In terms of international recognition and acclaim in architecture, it seems that men continue to rule the roost with big-time players like Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind topping the lists of would-be clients looking to make "the big statement". But that may be slowly changing. Iraqi-born and London-based architect Zaha Hadid this year became the first female to earn the prestigious Pritzker Prize for building design, no doubt inspiring a legion of women hoping to carve out their own niche in the field of architecture. While traditionally a male-dominated profession, notable exceptions include Italy's own Gaetana Aulenti, a veteran architect who is finally receiving long-overdue praise for a stellar career.
The praise has arrived at Aulenti's doorstep in large part because of her transformation of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, an eight-year, $160.5 million project. Her first major American commission and one of the most challenging of the 77-year-old architect's long career, Aulenti was summoned to rescue a $4 billion museum collection that was bulging at its seams. Set to move into San Francisco's former main library - a 1917 Beaux Arts style building - in the mid 1990s, the art museum asked the Italian architect to create a sympathetic space for 14,000 objects representing 6,000 years of Asian history. She didn't disappoint. While retaining the building's historic exterior, Aulenti opened the structure to natural light via skylights, creating an indoor piazza. Historic interior elements such as vaulted ceilings and a grand staircase were also untouched, but Aulenti added a dramatic feature with a two-storey tall glass-enclosed escalator which hugs an exterior wall. American writer Stephen McCauley calls Aulenti's design "a masterpiece of preservation, with sunlit staircases and airy galleries that lead you from one exhibit to the next with the logic and inevitability of a strong narrative".
Although the Asian Art Museum project has granted Aulenti some overdue recognition, the architect was hardly an unknown before the project. The spaciousness of the San Francisco museum recalls her renovation of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in the 1980s, where natural light was also introduced to the space. Her most famous project continues to be the transformation of an historic Paris train station at Orsay into an equally grand museum.
Aulenti was born in Palazzolo della Stella, Udine in 1927. After graduating from the Politecnico di Milano with an architecture degree in 1954, Aulenti struggled in a male-dominated profession and spent a decade in a kind of professional limbo before she could get serious building projects. Those early years of her career were still formative, however, as she collaborated with highly regarded architect Ernesto Rogers during a long stint with the respected design magazine Casabella. Soon she was designing products such as her Pipistrello lamp (still in production after 40 years) and designing showrooms for Italian clients such as FIAT and Olivetti. Over the course of her career, Aulenti has also contributed exhibition designs and theatre set designs, including work at Milan's famous La Scala. The variety of her work is indicative of her belief that an architect should be adept at many scales and forms. "The nature of Aulenti's designs - for flatware, doorknobs, household objects - tells of an intense level of activity, signifying not only talent but also a conception of architecture as infusing the everyday," wrote Vittorio Gregotti in the 1997 monograph Gae Aulenti.
The veteran architect was a natural choice to curate last year's New York exhibit, 1950-2000: Theater of Italian Creativity, which chronicled the Italian design phenomenon following the second World War. "All the objects in the exhibition are linked to the life of people my age," noted Aulenti. "It was a period with a lot of energy and with people who wanted to go in a new direction."
With a large-scale project like the Asian Art Museum added to her portfolio, Aulenti is proving energy and ideals are not restricted to youth.

Publication Date: 2004-10-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4528