Gae Aulenti: From the Pipistrello Lamp to the Musée d'Orsay

Gae Aulenti: From the Pipistrello Lamp to the Musée d'Orsay

Gae Aulenti worked across very different fields: architecture, furniture, lighting, stage design, museum design. She drew small domestic objects and turned a Paris railway station into a museum. Born in 1927 and dead in 2012, she belonged to a Milanese generation that did not separate the disciplines: for her, drawing a lamp and designing a museum were the same work, that of organising space and light.

Training

Gaetana Emilia Aulenti, known to everyone as Gae, enrolled in 1948 at the architecture faculty of the Politecnico di Milano, at a time when women architects were rare in reconstruction-era Italy. After graduating in the early 1950s, she joined the magazine Casabella-continuità, edited by Ernesto Nathan Rogers, where she worked as a graphic designer for about ten years. There she learned to think about a project without setting history and tradition against modernity.

Aulenti distanced herself early from orthodox, international modernism. She took an interest in the neo-liberty current, which brought the memory of forms, materials and controlled ornament back into a contemporary vocabulary. That position explains the character of her objects, which look less for abstract purity than for presence and fitness for use.

The Pipistrello

Her best-known object is the Pipistrello lamp, designed in 1965 for the Olivetti shops in Paris and Buenos Aires and produced by Martinelli Luce. Its opaline methacrylate diffuser, flared like the folded wings of a bat (pipistrello in Italian), sits on a chrome stem with a telescopic mechanism that adjusts its height.

The Pipistrello has stayed in near-continuous production, which raises a dating question on the vintage market: examples from the early decades show manufacturing, marking and material details that differ from recent editions. We set out these differences version by version, from 1965 to today, to help place a piece in time.

Fontana Arte and glass

The other major chapter of her work is her collaboration with Fontana Arte, the historic Milanese house of glass and light, where she was art director. There she designed one of her most cited objects, the Tavolo con ruote, a table made of a thick glass top resting on four industrial trolley castors. The idea came from repurposing a utilitarian object, since such wheels were normally used to move glass sheets around the workshop. The gesture is typical of its time: take a found, functional element and bring it into the home without disguising it.

At Fontana Arte, Aulenti worked with the transparency, thickness, reflections and colour of glass, and signed a series of lights and tables in which the glass carries the structure rather than decorating it. In this she followed the house's long tradition, founded decades earlier, while renewing it.

From the small object to the museum

In the 1980s she was entrusted with converting the former Gare d'Orsay into a museum. The project, completed in 1986, turned a railway building into a museum of nineteenth-century art, with a design approach that is still debated. She also worked on the layout of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou and on the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

From lamp to monument, her approach stayed the same. Whether for a light or a nave, Aulenti asked how light comes in, how the eye moves and how use finds its place.

On the vintage market

Aulenti's pieces are sought after for her name and for the quality of the houses that made them. The Pipistrello remains the most in demand, especially early examples in good original condition. Fontana Arte tables and lights from her period, which are rarer, mostly interest collectors. As often with models produced continuously, the price gap depends less on the model than on the production period, the condition and the traceability.

What we check

For a Pipistrello, we check the Martinelli Luce marking, the condition of the methacrylate diffuser, which yellows or crazes over time on some generations, and the working of the telescopic mechanism. For Fontana Arte pieces, we inspect the quality of the glass, any chips or re-cuts, and the consistency of the metal parts. Each piece is photographed in natural light, marking included, and its listing states the model, the estimated production period and the condition. Pieces for sale are on the Gae Aulenti page.