Industrial design Aulenti had a prolific career in
industrial design. Her Locus Solus furniture collection, introduced in 1964, was inspired by the country estate featured in
Raymond Roussel's 1912 novel of the same name. The collection comprised chairs, a table, an adjustable lamp, a sofa, a sun lounger, and a bench, all manufactured from
tubular cold-formed steel by the Poltronova furniture company. The Locus Solus collection was used as
set decoration in the film, La Piscine (1969). In 2023, a replica collection in off-white and yellow was produced for commercial sale. Lamps designed by Aulenti were notable for their style, innovation and function. The lamp featured a neck that could extend by 20 cm, allowing it to be positioned on either a table or the floor. The Ruspa table lamp (1967) was a
modular group of four lights. Direct light and indirect light from imbedded reflectors was controlled by angling of lamp's head. The Ruspa was unconventional as it was crafted in lacquered
aluminium instead of
plastic.
Olivetti, the maker of precision office machines, engaged Aulenti to design their showrooms in Paris (1967) and
Buenos Aires (1968). Aulenti describes her work for Olivetti as the pivotal starting point of her international career. The cars were showcased single file, each on an inclined metal platform set against mirrored walls. In 2025 Louis Vuitton relaunched the Monterey model inspired by the design created by Gae Aulenti. Aulenti also designed a line of
porcelain sanitary ware, which she called, the "Orsay" collection (1996). In 1975, the French president,
François Mitterrand, asked the French architectural firm, ACT to commence an
adaptive reuse project to convert the Gare d'Orsay into a new museum, the
Musée d'Orsay. Initially, Aulenti was assigned solely to the interior design of the new museum. However, due to disagreements between ACT and the curators, her role expanded to encompass the overall architectural planning of the project. Aulenti successfully advocated for changes to the ACT design, which the curators believed was overly tied to neo-classical aesthetics and excessively ornate.
Limestone tiles, in various shades of white, were attached to the surfaces of the ramp, platforms on the ramp and, at one end of the corridor, two new towers. Natural light enters the building from the original large, glass,
barrel-vault ceiling, windows facing the
Rue de Lille and from new
oculi. By adding artificial lighting, Aulenti was able to achieve a uniform quality of illumination throughout the museum.
Charles Jencks, cultural theorist and architectural historian, described the Musée d'Orsay as an example of a "
postmodern museum", where there is tension due to the past needing to exist in the present and the artistic in the academic. Jencks said, "The train shed, a symbol of nineteenth-century power and materialism, meets a thirteenth-century cathedral layout in a twentieth-century temple to the contradictions of nineteenth-century art." He wrote of the museum,The linear, suiting trains, also suits historical sequence with startling results. They give a clear beginning, middle and end to the gentle stroll through history. Overhead, the wide barrel vault of the old station spreads a generous light that pulls one gently up the progression of French art. The floor and the visitor mount slowly, too ... Gae Aulenti has articulated the walls to either side of this nave space in heavy Egyptian tones, but also with horizontal streamlines that push forward ... thus, the railway station becomes a cathedral with the left aisle housing the
avant-garde and the right aisle holding the
academy. Up the middle, the nave mixes the two competitors but not indiscriminately.
Paul Goldberger, architectural critic, wrote in
The New York Times,Unfortunately, the results of this ambitious project are, architecturally speaking, not natural at all. They are contrived, awkward and uncomfortable. The newly created Musée d'Orsay may be the most ambitious conversion of an old building into a museum in the modern history of Paris, but it is also a work of architecture that is deeply insensitive both to the original Gare d'Orsay and to the works of art it is supposed to be protecting and displaying. It will do little to advance the art of museum design, and it may well set the business of architectural
recycling back a generation.Aulenti received the
Chevalier de Légion d'honneur in 1987. Aulenti was engaged to redesign the portion of the Musée occupying the fourth floor of the center, to create modular spaces better suited for smaller exhibitions, and to reduce the amount of natural light impacting the artworks. Aulenti created galleries of varying sizes along a building-length, unobstructed corridor-gallery set beside the west windows. She installed shelves, alcoves and pedestals within the galleries and created small corridors linking the galleries for fragile items that required low light.
Palazzo Grassi The
Palazzo Grassi is an 18th-century mansion on the
Grand Canal in
Venice, Italy. In 1983, when the Palazzo was owned by the
Fiat group, Aulenti was commissioned to refurbish the building as an art exhibition space. The Palazzo was gutted and refurbished over a thirteen-month period, reopening on 15 April 1985. The existing three-level building was dark and labyrinthine, making its original features difficult to distinguish. Aulenti examined contemporary Venetian buildings for elements associated with the Palazzo's original architect,
Giorgio Massari. Having repaired the original masonry with salvaged 19th century bricks, Aulenti fixed new utilities in a way that would leave the restored masonry undisturbed, even in future renovations. In the following years, Aulenti returned a number of times to the Palazzo Grassi to design popular exhibitions.
I Fenici (1988)
, I Celti (1991) and
I Greci in Occidente (1996) were all months long archeological expositions designed for the non-scholar. In creating
I Fenici (The Phoenicians) with
Sabatino Moscati, archeologist and curator of the exhibition, Aulenti created a path for visitors with two distinct educational threads; first, a traditional display of archaeological objects categorized by
typology and
geography and second, an exploration of
Phoenician culture.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya The ''
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya'' at the
Palau Nacional,
Barcelona, home of the
Catalan visual arts collection, was constructed on
Montjuïc for the
1929 World's Fair. As part of a design team including Enric Steegman and Josep Benedito, between 1985 and 1992, Aulenti refurbished the Saló Oval (the main hall) and consolidated two temporary exhibition rooms for the
1992 Summer Olympics. Glass was added to the outer walls of the Saló Oval for better illumination and once again, Castiglioni created the artificial lighting plan.
Japan Aulenti designed the
chancellery of the Italian Embassy (2004) and the Italian Cultural Institute (2005) in
Tokyo. At the Italian Cultural Institute, Aulenti used an
RAL 3011 coloured
cladding, a red-brown hue which was controversial due to the perceived intensity of the colour. On the ten year anniversary of Aulenti's death, the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo presented an exhibition of her drawings, photographs, models and materials called
Uno sguardo sul Giappone e sul mondo (A look at Japan and the world). In 1991, Aulenti converted a 17th-century granary at the
Torrecchia Vecchia estate in
Lazio to a villa for
Carlo Caracciolo. Aulenti designed the Italian
Pavilion at the
Seville Expo '92 and the redevelopment of the
Piazzale Cadorna (2000) in Milan.
Stage design Aulenti and
Luca Ronconi, theatre director and producer, founded
Laboratorio di Progettazione Teatrale (the
Prato Theatre design workshop) in the late 1970s. Together, they staged 16 productions including,
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Calderón,
Euripide's Le Baccanti, and
Hugo von Hofmannsthall's La Torre. In her stage design, Aulenti looked to
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's work,
A Manifesto of Variety Theatre (1913)
. Marinetti rejected imitation of the historic and the obsessive reproduction of daily life. Rather, he chose freedom in design, the use of a cinematic background, and imaginative, satiric and futuristic concepts. At
La Scala in 1977, Aulenti created the stage design for
Wozzeck, the
atonal opera by
Alban Berg.
Claudio Abbado was the conductor with
Gloria Lane and Guglielmo Sarabia the principals. Aulenti's daughter, Giovanna Buzzi, designed the costumes. Lonchampt wrote, This device has the major drawback of raising the stage quite considerably and of distancing the singers from the room. The sound is lost in the
flies and in the first rows, at least, the voices seem thin, without force or resonance ... unreal ... which is serious in a work with such brief tableaux, where the listener must feel the physical presence of the characters from the outset. Nicholas Vitaliano, Ronconi's biographer, wrote that Aulenti and Ronconi wanted to designed a "stage machine", a moving surface traversing the entire stage, which was otherwise left in almost entire darkness. Aulenti's stage design for Ronconi's production of
Rossini's opera,
Il viaggio a Reims (
Journey to Reims) at the
Rossini Opera Festival in
Pesaro (1984) involved on-stage television monitors. From their position on the stage,
video operators filmed the performance and in real time, broadcast the recordings, such as close-ups of the singers, onto the monitors. In addition, actors (playing the king and his retinue) were filmed processing on the streets outside the theatre. La Scala was too small for the expected audience and so the production was moved to the
Palazzo dello sport (the Milan sports centre). In the stadium space, Aulenti and Ronconi created a
spectacle. In the act, "Lucifer's dance", the "spirit of negation" appeared on
stilts in front of a very large human face. The character on stilts controlled the face through the music of a wind band that was seated on a vertical frame on the stage. Aulenti also created the stage designs for
Elektra by
Richard Strauss in Milan (1984) and
The Wild Duck by
Henrik Ibsen in
Genoa.
Benjamin Buchloh commented that designers, such as Aulenti, are able to highlight their own "trademark" architectural aesthetic by incorporating it into their exhibition design. He was critical, suggesting that this is to the detriment of the artistic work or object being displayed. Buchloch described Aulenti's "zig-zag" design, when placed in the curved space of the Guggenheim, as a "
vagina dentata".
Milan Triennial Aulenti had an association with the
Milan Triennial over many years. Aulenti was a member of the executive of the Triennial from 1977 to 1980. She designed spaces for installations at exhibitions such as the
1951–2001 Made in Italy? (2001). == Professional affiliations ==