Architects and designers: It is Also a Matter of Sources

The Archive of the Alvar Aalto Institute in Pino Torinese

Abstract

The circularity of knowledge and design approaches that characterizes architecture and design clearly emerges as long as the research questions and interprets the sources starting from the assumption that, in many historical phases, there is no solution of continuity between the two disciplines. The research method typical of the history of architecture settled over centuries of practice, which diachronically sees many historiographical schools on both a national and international scale and which has among its characteristics the contamination between neighbouring knowledge and the analysis of varied sources, a starting from information archives, it can in this sense be exploited to articulate and expand research on design by strengthening the philological method to obtain more effective syntheses, also in order to enhance deposits of information/archives for the presentation and use of public varied: from scholars to non-specialists. The archive of the Alvar Aalto Institute in Turin (founded in 1979) is a good testing ground for simulating the subdivision of the families of sources (design, architecture, visual arts, applied arts) and for the reunions/superimpositions of the different moments in starting from transversal themes to be made available through exhibition tools, digital archives that can be interrogated according to multilevel queries. In fact, the Institute presents, in the multiplicity of documents preserved, at least two substantial corpora, one relating to the multifaceted activity of Nicola Mosso and one centred on the relationships between Leonardo Mosso and Alvar Aalto, allowing to define two broad chronological arcs that embrace crucial phases for the history of the project: the period between the two wars and the period from the second postwar period to the eighties.