Outfitting of the “Ignazio Gardella Drawings and Architecture” exhibition

PAC Milan (with N.Marras graphics by Lapiswerk)

Ideated by Ignazio Gardella between 1947 and 1953, The Milano PAC hosts the exhibition about the architecture of its own designer. Commissioned to curate the exhibit, Castiglioni treated this temporary interpretation of the space as a unique opportunity to make a permanent contribution to the museum by reconstructing the false ceiling removed years before because of maintenance difficulties. Requested and approved by Gardella himself, the reconstruction recreates the essential design of the ceiling’s original lightweight Venetian slats, but controls the natural and artificial illumination to comply with current rules for the preservation and display of artworks. Suspended below the great skylights, V-shaped aluminum slats, easy to keep clean and dismantle, leave the walls bare. The result is to filter the light received by the exhibits, which is then refracted and diffused by the white panels of the ceiling. The display was conceived as a travelling exhibition and was mounted very simply, using only those graphics deemed essential to the presentation. On the ground floor it was laid out along the walls of the rooms; on the first floor it was set on temporary walls. The first room – in a sense a tribute to the city of Milan – contained the earliest and the most recent of the twenty-two projects presented, both of them for Piazza del Duomo: the Torre Littorio of 1934 and the restructuring of the square for the Metropolitana Milanese in 1988. The route throw the show then moved backwards in time, from the drawings for Lambrate Station in 1986 to the extension of Villa Borletti in 1935, searching for the most significant moment and the roots of the Gardela’s design journey. Each project was presented first in a blown-up image and then, whenever possible, throw the original drawings, reproductions, photos of the finished work and a number of models, The photos by Gabriele Basilico, almost an exhibition within the exhibition, were brought together on the first-floor gallery overlooking the sequence of rooms.