garage BENTIVOGLIO

A design object that would have made Chichibio’s fortune. A three-legged wader that, like all of Albini’s work, plays on structural tension and balance. A living room valet stand that seems less like a place to set things down and more like a gesture of offering household items to a guest. Produced in the early 1950s by Poggi and featured in the Cassina catalog as a reissue since 2008, the 'Cicognino' is a clear, precise object that encapsulates all the design and compositional research of the Milanese architect. It rests on three points like the 'Mitragliera'; its longest leg, which folds, recalls the elegant joint between the leg and armrest of the 'Luisa' chair, while its upward reach echoes that of all Albini’s bookcases. The tabletop, shaped like a water lily leaf, becomes a tray with a simple movement; the raised edge, which in nature prevents the plant from being submerged, here keeps objects from sliding off, while revealing the structure beneath. Throughout his professional career, shared from the postwar period with Franca Helg, Franco Albini placed the relationship between exhibiting and looking at the heart of his research. His body of work includes an endless number of pavilions, exhibition designs, and museums created over the years, with design solutions that eventually flowed into his domestic interiors. The unstable balance of the 'Elevatio animae' on its telescopic piston (previously exhibited inside the BENTIVOGLIO garage) is comparable to that of the SC27 desk; the pressure-fit uprights of the LB7 bookcase are a formal solution analogous to, for example, his famous exhibition design for the Scipione show (1941) at the Pinacoteca di Brera or the Picasso ceramics exhibition (1951) at the Triennale; the tripartite structure of the 'Cicognino' shares similarities with the display units of the Museo di San Lorenzo (1952-1956). If living and visiting are two different experiences, Albini unites them through the most bourgeois act of all: looking. And if observing is the task of the inhabitant-visitor, then exhibiting the object and laying it bare is the task of the architect; on a living room side table, even a simple ashtray can aspire to be a work of art.