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As it has
developed through the 20th century, the world of the car
has followed and often anticipated the birth and success
of modern design. Industry and craftwork, mass-produced
and custom-built parts, items for the masses and
individual desires, poor materials and well calibrated
luxury, mechanical and manual skills, colour, smell and
touch, speed and convenience: contrasting
characteristics that combine in the construction of a
car as an article of design and which have distinguished
and continue to reflect the deep identity of Italian
manufacturing culture. A unique capacity to build an
identity through the complex relationship and merger
between the industrial process and artisan poetry,
blending modernity and ancient traditions to create
objects that become both products for an ever-growing
public and the stuff of one’s innermost desires.
The Lancia Tour Italian Design presents a dynamic, light
display that presents a visual, symbolic link between
the most important models that have made Lancia history
and some of the most important objects of Italian design
created during the century. It is a very elementary,
immediate way of depicting the Italian system and its
capacity to design and create objects that combine great
technological performance and unique aesthetic
qualities.
Throughout the last century and in the first years of
the new Millennium, Lancia and the best Italian design
have succeeded in combining experimentation, innovation
and poetical attention to detail, creating unique
objects that enter our everyday life, illuminating it
with new significance and visions for the future.
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The relationship between the five Lancia models and the
design objects selected focuses on a formal, sensory
association of atmospheres and material qualities rather
than a mere chronological and historical division. The
historical Lambda of the 1920s alongside innovative,
rational futuristic objects – as the car was itself when
it was first produced; the middle-class elegance of the
Flaminia, the daughter of the years straight after the
first world war, together with articles with an artisan
grace and an almost domestic warmth; the self-confidence
of the mythical B24 the symbol of the economic boom,
with daring, new, modern sporty items. The industrial
rigour of the Lancia Delta Abarth of the 1970s, and
brutal products with sharp lines, as daring as the
rallies that the car dominated; and finally, the recent
Momo Design alongside objects with cheerful pop tones,
that are fresh, youthful and metropolitan.
We wanted to invent a living exhibition in which all the
Lancia cars were surrounded by icons of Italian design
that are still in production and available in Italy and
abroad, and in which the car was interpreted as an
extraordinary object of top design, compared with the
best of Italian creative output. Not a museum display,
in other words, but an intense, living dialogue, that
could involve the public while it narrated important
fragments of recent Italian creative and industrial
history.
Luca Molinari
Luca
Molinari was born in 1966, he graduated from the Faculty
of Architecture in Milan in 1992, after time spent
working and studying at the Faculty of Architecture–TU
in Delft (Holland) in 1989, and ETSAB in Barcelona
(Spain) in 1990-92. He is currently the coordinator of
the Naba School of Design in Milan. Since 1995 he has
been editorial manager for the Design and Architecture
sector of the Skira publishing house. He writes for and
collaborates with Italian and foreign magazines,
including Abitare, Domus, Lotus, Il progetto, Area,
Archis, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui and Vanity Fair
(Italy). Molinari also acts as a consultant for public
and private institutions operating in the field of
architecture.
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