TRIENNALE – 100 YEARS OF OLIVARI HANDLES
TRIENNALE DI MILANO
20 april 2011
Olivari have celebrated at the Triennale di Milano, the 100th year of its foundation with the show 100 years of Olivari handles, edited by Stefano Casciani. Retracing the history of Olivari it has been an opportunity to review the ongoing and two-way relationship between the design culture and the history of architecture through the evolution of a product, the handle, which only apparently seems to be simple.
Olivari appointed Fabio Calvi and Paolo Brambilla, to organise the exhibition, wich was divided into five moments that traced the history of the company through archives models, starting from the handle commissioned by Marcello Piacentini for the Palace of Justice of Milan until the most recent designed by Shigheru Ban, through famous models like the handle by Gio Ponti for the Villa Planchart and the one by BBPR for the Velasca Tower.
The show also included the trials in plastic, aluminum and glass, and the models of the designers who made the history of Italian design (Albini, Branzi, Caccia Dominioni, Colombo, Gardella, Magistretti, Mangiarotti, Mendini, Mari …) and those of today’s leading players (Dordoni, Irvine, Lissoni, Urquiola) as well as projects by great architects such as Holl, Ito, Libeskind and Perrault.
The exhibition has accompanied the homonymous book published by Skira, which continues and studies in depth the previous book “The Architecture taken by the hand”, also written by Stefano Casciani for Olivari in 1992.