Biography

The Italian architect, furniture, and lighting designer Gae Aulenti, born in Udine in 1927, completed her architecture studies in Milan in 1954 and is considered one of the most important female voices in Italian and international architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the mid-1960s, she was commissioned to design the new Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. The starting point for her design, which featured calculators displayed on staircase-like platforms, was the concept of a piazza.

At the height of her career, she was commissioned to convert the former Parisian d’Orsay railway station into a museum (1980–1986). This was followed in 1982 by the redesign of the interiors of the Musée d’Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as well as the renovation of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. “The architect,” she said in an interview, “must be able to read the context, because very often the roots are hidden and lie underground. Knowing how to recognize them and bring them to light is the great task of the historical reinterpretation of a place.”

With their emphasis on structure combined with formal elegance, Aulenti’s furniture and lighting designs contributed significantly to the fame of so-called Italian Bel Design in the 1960s and 1970s. Iconic furniture designs emerged as early as the 1960s. In 1962, the “Sgarsul” rocking chair was released, followed in 1964 by the “Locus Solus” chair and table series from Poltronova. In 1965, she designed her famous “Pipistrello” table lamp for the Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires, which is still in production today by Martinelli Luce; she established a collaboration with this company that continued in 1967 with the production of the “Ruspa” lamp.

Aulenti chose to eschew a recognizable personal style or a “trademark”—a decision that almost became an ideological statement against the trend toward self-promotion. The elegance of her designs is rooted in a rigor that distances itself from any form of artistic vanity.

She passed away in Milan in 2012. Numerous solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her: in 2022, the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein presented a retrospective, and in 2025, a retrospective of her sixty-year career was on view at the Triennale Museum in Milan.

Objects by Gae Aulenti