Magistretti Viaggi e Progetti

“I travelled the world…”

Magistretti Voyages Projects

«I have had to travel, and wanted to travel… in short, I’ve travelled quite extensively around the world. It was enormously useful, above all one trip I made when I was still young…»
The exhibition narrates Vico’s voyage (because it was indeed a voyage, rather than voyages, an incessant attraction that always prompted new departures) on a dual register: the first follows the gaze of the tourist, captured in black and white photographs from 1947 to 1960, a gaze that shifted from “amazement” to very careful attention to details he would later return to and rework in his projects of design and architecture, often with humour, always in a very penetrating way.
The second register is that of his activity as an architect, with the selection of three projects addressing three different building types, a hotel (for Techint at Campana, Argentina), a showroom (Centro Styling Cerruti 1881 in Paris), and a private dwelling (the Tanimoto house in Tokyo). Sketches, plans, project descriptions and a small model take us into the three places, and above all into the three ways Magistretti approached the context.
The exhibition also presents, through a video montage, a selection of about 200 images from family albums, containing the proofs of the photos (over 700) in which Vico narrates and is narrated in his travels, from the initial postwar period to the end of the 1950s: images of vacations in Italy, France, Spain, England («London is the most beautiful city in the world», he liked to repeat), Switzerland, Argentina; portraits of his wife and with his wife; or details that at times cannot be connected to a recognizable location (a floor with geometric motifs, a rural chair in wood, the entrance to a building). Images that seem to form a sort of archive of possible creative stimuli, on which to draw.
Finally, on one of the wood panels with which Magistretti covered the walls of the studio, on which he attached images, sketches, notes, copies of a selection of photographs have been placed, gathered under the title Look at usual things with unusual eyes: as Vico said, behind everyday, normal things there is always something… you just have to know how to look in an “abnormal” way.

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