Bar Craja by Luciano Baldessari

Total Design for a Milanese Interior (from Rovereto to Berlin)

Keywords: Luciano Baldessari, Total Design, Artistic Avant-Gardes, Disciplinary Contaminations, Relational Mapping

Abstract

The contribution intends to highlight the personal relationships with the artistic movements of the European avant-garde that led Luciano Baldessari (Rovereto, 1896 - Milan, 1982) to create one of the very first rationalist interiors in Milan: the Bar Craja. This project, to the realization of which Baldessari invited the young architects Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini and the artists Fausto Melotti and Marcello Nizzoli to collaborate, is a total design work that from the definition of the space to the design of all the furnishings, up to the creation of works of art, is the tangible result of the experiences gained by Baldessari in the Futurist Circle of Rovereto (1913-1915), in Vienna (1916) and in Weimer's Berlin in close contact with the expressionist environment of cinema, theatre and of avant-garde architecture (1923-1926). Bar Craja was dismantled in 1964 but Laura Rosati's accurate 3D reconstruction brought it back to life, albeit in a digital dimension.

Author Biography

Graziella Leyla Ciagà, Politecnico di Milano

She is a researcher and professor in History of Architecture and Design at the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano. After graduating in Architecture, she obtained a PhD in Conservation of Architectural and Environmental Heritage and a specialization in Restoration of Monuments. Her teaching and research activity concerns two fields of study: the enhancement of cultural heritage in its various forms, from monumental and landscape complexes to documentary ones, and the history of Italian design and architecture of the twentieth century. She collaborates with the Archival Superintendency and the Center for Advanced Studies on Visual Arts of the Municipality of Milan (CASVA), taking care of the census of the design, graphic and architecture archives in Lombardy. She is the curator of the Luciano Baldessari Archive at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano.

Published
2021-10-04
Issue
Vol 8 No 15 (2021): Relational Geographies in the History of Design
Section
Micro-histories

Copyright (c) 2021 Graziella Leyla Ciagà

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivates 4.0 international License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).