“Humans matter only insomuch as they contribute to a historic process; outside of history, humans are nothing.” ~ Carlo Mollino

It is foggy outside, not the thin mist that simulates marine haze but the denser variety where visibility tends to destabilize objects, preventing them from ever coming into focus. And so it is today. We have made the 2-hour drive from Milano to Turino in Italy, a drive of 150 kms. Our bus driver is a cross-tempered, mean-mouthed young man who has long threatening harangues in Italian on his phone. We understand very little except the essence of it all. Either he seems to be leaving someone or he is fighting this outcome in the most desperate ways. But we are the sorry victims of his darkness. On the bus, all sixteen of us careen from one side of our seat to another even with our seatbelts buckled. We brace, we feel broadsided, we are squarely in the crosshairs of a relationship gone bad. At once I feel that we are living on the edge of a vast energy field, a limitless ocean of emotional and mental turmoil that is impossible to fathom. These thoughts persist as we pull into Turin around 11 a.m.

I am still fighting off the wine from last night’s dinner at Il Capestrano, a fancy restaurant in Milan specializing in the cuisine of Abruzzo. Our long-time friend and guide extraordinaire, Judy, has meticulously planned every aspect of our trip to view design and art in Milan. She has a sixth sense about things, curating every part of our 8-day adventure so that each one of us will have our deepest desires met. I don’t quite know it but today, at the Casa Mollino in Turin, Judy will have made sure that my insatiable thirst will be quenched, if for a minute. For the longest time, I’ve had an uncanny fascination with Carlo Mollino, an eclectic architect and designer who saw the world in broad swaths of connectedness. I’ve wanted to know him better. And in his apartment in Casa Mollino, under the tutelage of the curator, Napoleone Ferrari, I am about to receive a thorough grounding on who Carlo Mollino was and what he left behind. 

1888 Villa Avondo—the street address of Casa Mollino–hides behind brambly rose bushes past a wrought-iron gate on a half-forgotten side street. Mollino owned three such apartments all over Turin—places where he could indulge his creative interests away from his controlling father. Casa Mollino was his escape room, the one spot that he endlessly worked on but hardly ever used and never quite lived in. This is the Warrior’s House of Rest that Mollino conceived as his final resting place. Like the ancient Egyptians whom he undoubtedly studied at the nearby Egyptian Museum, Mollino spent eight years preparing this house like an ancient tomb, filling it with everything that he thought he might need in the afterworld. He decorated the interior, remodeled furniture for the space, fashioned the wall coverings and mirror etchings, designed the photographic displays, and even hand-crafted an oval-shaped bed that resembled the Egyptian skiffs that ferried the dead into the afterlife. Mollino believed that the Egyptians had perfected the art of dying by preparing for their death for much of their life. Outside, the River Po flowed by, his Egyptian-influenced burial chamber overlooking the river of life. A desolate looking ankh—which opens the mouth through which the soul escapes the body—lay in wait on the apartment’s windowsill.

Interestingly, Mollino completed the interior of Casa Mollino and the design of the Regio Opera House and the Turin Chamber of Commerce at the same time. They are so markedly different one from the other that it seems that at least two different architects have designed them. In fact, Mollino considered architecture “a linguistic system that combined different styles and building techniques as a vocabulary to draw on” according to Ferrari. He drew on this extensive vocabulary to complete the final projects in the last decade of his life, 1960-73.

In life, Mollino developed himself to his fullest capacity.  An architect; sportsman; cultural historian; designer of motor cars, haute couture, furniture, interiors, and erotica; a photographer; writer of novels and an autobiography; a skier; acrobatic flight instructor; and a professor of architecture at the Polytechnic of Turin from 1949 to his death in 1973, Mollino more faithfully resembled a Renaissance polymath than an Egyptian royal aspiring for the afterlife.

Mollino, who was born, lived and died in Turin (1905-73), cultivated an everything, everywhere, all at once type of outlook. He was born in this famous city known for housing Jesus’ shroud and lived in the 19^th century neo-Gothic Casa Rivoli. An only child born into a wealthy family overrun by women, he was pampered by his mother, great aunts, and housekeepers. His father, Eugenio, provided the controls in his life. A strict disciplinarian and a renowned architect, Eugenio had 300 architectural buildings to Carlo’s 13. And this is what Carlo ultimately took away from his parents—Eugenio’s passion and rigor for architectural and foundational brilliance and his mother, Jolanda’s, ability for nurturing and spontaneous exploration.  

Stylistically, he fancied himself a Surrealist trending toward his own definition of a Modernist. He was one of the first to have arrived at a definition of what contemporary art meant. He meticulously formulated his ideas on the interconnectedness of all life, noticing the arabesque whiplashes of Art Nouvaeu paintings mirrored in the wide-open sinuous S’s of a skier forming patterns as he glided down hillsides. Or an aeronautical stunt pilot figure-skating in the skies. Beginning with the marble of the fireplace to the designs on the windowpanes, fabric designs of the recliners to the reflected images in multiple mirrors set up for self-reflexiveness, he left nothing to chance.

Taking nature as a source for both engineering and creative energy, Mollino synthesized. He interconnected, filled in the blanks, and formed a coherent universe that was hardly apparent to those with limited imagination. Even as he was creating, he was hypothesizing, theorizing, drawing out generalizations from the evidence that was provided for him. His 50,000 paged archival holdings at the University of Turin formulates detailed drawings on everything:  the scale and proportion of ski lifts and backless dresses, the seat of an ample chair resembling the fleshy buttocks of a seated woman, and stunts for airplanes that twisted past hairpin bends and death-defying turns. He fashioned race cars after turbines that referenced the bombs that fell during the blitz. Ultimately, he was interested in mirror images, of silhouettes repeating themselves, in how energies converged or diverged. His imprimatur was lightness and dynamism, of the quickness of joy and the swift movement of the passage of time. 

When we leave Napoleone Ferrari’s curated tour of the Casa Mollino, we are in tears. Napoleone is crying silently because Carlo has not received the recognition that he so richly deserves. Some of us are crying because we are humbled by the genius of a man who worked quietly to make the world a better place for all.