
It’s been twenty years since the last Triennale and thirty since the last great exhibition on interiors (The Domestic Project, 1986), so for the “ROOMS. Novel Living Concepts” exhibition – entitled “STANZE. Altre filosofie dell’abitare” in Italian – we decided to choose a number of seminal books to inform the eleven interior designs providing an overview of this particular period in time. Books that triggered major reflection and debate. A matter of choice, obviously, very personal and therefore open to discussion.
We started with an introductory reference text that serves to inspire the ethos of the exhibition: Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), by the Anglo-Polish architectural historian and historian of ideas Joseph Rykwert. Rykwert demonstrated that some of the great masters of modern architecture (such as Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos and Frank L. Wright) resorted, at crucial points in their careers, when introducing radical innovations, to a barely veiled mythology about the origins of building, perpetrating, as it were, the image of a first house, correct because it was the first, long gone yet remaining archetypical in our minds.
The stanzas are the rooms of the heart, as Dante Alighieri said: “At that moment I say truly that the vital spirit, that which lives in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble…” (Vita Nuova).
Ferruccio M. Cataluccio