Luciano Baldessari: Architetture per la scena

Designing in theatrical terms meant, for Baldessari, ‘thinking in motion’: trajectories, foreshortenings, chiaroscuro animate his volumes, whether they are real theatre scenes or domestic interiors, art exhibition layouts or industrial pavilions. Baldessari’s sense of rhythm is harmonic: it is a matter of music. There are pauses and silences, pianissimo and allegro con brio. Above all, the dimension of temporality and sequence is vivid in its forms: living – architecture, public space, one’s own life – is an experience.

And it is a corporeal experience: as on the theatre stage, whether we see it or not, the body is the protagonist. The protagonists are its perceptions, the need to explore, the pleasure of movement, the rejection of predictability and boredom. Within this framework, as complex philosophically as it is simple in its translation into everyday practice, the boundaries between fashion, dance, set design, design, even urban planning blur: the Luminator mannequin, for example, designed for the 1929 Barcelona Expo, was created as a support for textiles, but it twirls like a dancer, illuminates, creates refractions in space, has a sculptural bearing. And an architecture in its own right.