In the early seventies, a group of young architects won the competition for the construction of the new cultural center in Paris, with a project destined to change the museum paradigms of the late twentieth century. The long façade on rue du Renard and Rue Beauborg is solved like an enormous anatomical model: for passers-by it is possible to see the great functioning of the architectural machine, since all the distribution, functional and energy systems are brought to the foreground, leaving behind the museum floors totally free and without interruption. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, assisted by Giancarlo Franchini, Su Rogers, Edmund Happold and Peter Rice, thus bring to fruition the Lecorbuserian dream of plan libre and elevate the entire building to a monument of the modern machine, no longer forced to hide behind infill walls. \n In the same years, Francesco Trabucco and Marcello Vecchi created for Alfatec a product fundamental to the fate of the company itself, soon becoming its best-seller. With the assembly of a few existing elements, they design the Vacuum Cleaner Bin, capable of crossing the collective imagination and of being the protagonist of the domestic universe even when not in operation. The green color and the large white lettering make it look like an object just fished out of military surplus stores, which in those years have now become all the rage to stock up on low-cost clothing. The success was immediate, also thanks to an extremely pop communication: in an advertisement from the early Eighties, the long suction tube wraps its coils around the body of a young woman like a Laocoon, snatching a mischievous smile from her. \n Machines, indispensable protagonists of our daily lives, come out of cavities and closets, become seductive and are definitely eager to be looked at.
