About cars, furniture, and architecture, part II

This is the point that, at the beginning of the 1920s, as Gallati pointed out in the rest of the article, was addressed - and theorised in "Vers une architecture" of 1923 - by Le Corbusier, with his houses called, not by chance, Citrohan, thus underlining their seriality and economy, concepts taken from automobile production: "the car is a subject with a simple function that has imposed the need for standardization on big industry (...) Houses are cars to be inhabited". It is not always by chance that Le Corbusier recognized in Lingotto, a 1923 masterpiece by Matte' Trucco, a rare "model for including cars in architecture: cars and buildings do not intersect (...) but there is just what the car needs: asphalt to be bitten on the track above the roof. (Gallati), a roof that is reached by two formidable helical ramps. The idea of the Lingotto - and the Citroen and Renault plants of the 1930s in Javel and Billancourt - is the same as that of the integrated production cycle in Detroit. In Javel, a large window that opened onto the assembly hall, to transmit the progressive contents of mass production, was also beating a parallel path, that of architectural design as part of the advertising message, which thus becomes permanent advertising. And an element of urban furnishing - among other things, an indirect subsidiary of the "industrial city" between the 19th and 20th centuries, at the time an operation of social policy and image together, such as Crespi d'Adda, now a UNESCO heritage site. As a national monument, in Lyon, the Citroen branch built-in 1932 by Jacques Ravazè, head of the architectural service created in Javel five years earlier, with the task of overseeing the construction of new buildings and advise dealers in their preparations, in a framework as homogeneous as possible. The Lyon branch was designed with the collaboration of an engineer, Bergerat, two architects, Wybo and Lagrange, an artist Jean Prouvè, an avant-garde designer and expert in industrial-scale iron modeling.

In the second half of the 20th century, Gallati noticed how the relationship between architecture and the automobile had progressively turned towards the celebratory, museum or evocative building such as the C42 Citroen, on the Champs Elysées. As for the production plant, while automation and robotization partially modify the interior spaces, it is the problem of emissions, recycling, placement in the natural or urban environment that dictates new lines. But it must be said that already after the Second World War, a closer dialogue between car and interior design had been established, with reciprocal contributions in terms of lines and materials, "with the assimilation of aerodynamic forms in the design: a trend that led to the preference, in the USA, of the rounded lines of kitchen elements, created in homage to the bodywork of cars...". Apart from the kitchens, a particularly successful example of this dialogue was the dashboard of the Ds (in the photo), which Flaminio Bertoni created after a long gestation, in search of a project consistent with the external line. The result was an object with curved and taut lines, in two unusual colors, blue and plum, one and a half meters long but weighing less than 750 grams because it was made of one-piece molded nylon (and nylon would also have been the crown of the monoblock steering wheel). Bertoni was a designer, painter, sculptor, inventor...and architect, but the professional life that made him famous was almost all in the world of the automobile: it must be said that "pure" architects measured themselves with the automotive design, giving life to hypotheses that remained so, but not without ideas and suggestions collected and realized. This was the case, again, of Le Corbusier, with his "Voiture" (1930) - "minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality" - or even before the Cantilever Car by Wright (1920) and in the 50s the Bisiluro Racecar by Mollino and Taruffi and the "Diamante" by Gio Ponti. In the years that followed, and often on the occasion of the Salone del Mobile, in the wake of Picabia, Duchamp and Léger, many artists were fascinated by mechanical parts or individual bodywork elements, creating installations of "anatomy of the car"...

All in all, do you think you can say that something has moved? In summary, we could suggest, for the next Salone, space, an event, a... call it and do it as you like, dedicated to revisiting, better than we have done here, the themes reviewed.