An unmissable opportunity to look closely at the typically Milanese way of conceiving domestic interiors, take inspiration and reread an extraordinary chapter in the history of Italian architecture, and also of history of Milan. The precious opportunity is given by the exhibition In homes. Interiors in Milan 1928-1978curated by Enrico Morteo and Orsina Simona Pierini, with installation by Daniela Ledda, open to the public until 16 March 2025 in Villa Necchi Campiglioa FAI property in the heart of Milan.
The initiative was born from the book of the same name, published by Hoepliwhich tells the history of living in Milan with a look from the inside, or rather at the interiors of extraordinary Milanese housesdesigned between the Thirties and Seventies, and sometimes even inhabited, by some of the greatest and most famous Italian architects, starting with Villa Necchi Campiglio. The exhibition indeed celebrates a game of mirrors between content and containerbetween Piero Portaluppi’s architecture of 1932 and the pages of the book and the exhibition supports that tell about it.
This is not a traditional exhibition but a reflection on living that grants the pleasure of snoop inside famous houses to grasp its aesthetics and functionality, modernity and wisdom of solutions, details and compositional elements. For the FAI it is also a training opportunity, almost didactic: the opportunity to invite the public to train taste for beautystimulate understanding and have an even more attentive look when visiting Villa Necchi, to appreciate its interiors in comparison with the panorama of the others Milanese houseswhich have a lot to teach about style and taste, about living and living.
The exhibition literally showcases much of the content of the volume published by Hoepli, which is the outcome of exceptional extensive and systematic researchconducted by Morteo and Pierini, which collects and organizes a true heritage of the history of architecture and design. The research, which began in 2018, took further consideration 300 interiors created in Milan between 1928 and 1978of which 200 are published in the volume and the majority neatly represented in the exhibition. At 71 architects’ houses – yes Piero Portaluppi a Nanda Vigoyes Luigi Caccia Dominioni a Joe Colombo – documents and images of further interiors are added to the exhibition, specially selected to illustrate various themes that run through the civilization of modern living, which evolves and reflects the social and cultural changes that have marked the city.
The interiors of these private houses, and therefore inaccessible to the public, some of which are now lost, are here revealed and analyzed through a rich and rigorous graphic and photographic documentationlargely taken from archives, foundations and magazines, in other part specially written by the authors, reworked and reproduced in large format, in albums distributed on lecterns in the spaces of Villa Necchi, freely browseable by the public and accompanied by podcasts with the guide in viva voce of the curators.
Already in 2018 Villa Necchi had successfully hosted the transposition into exhibition form of a similar volume, Milanese houses. Images of a cityalso published by Hoepli and edited by Simona Pierini and Alessandro Isastia, which reviewed 23 urban residential architectures, analyzing them overall and in detail.
The exhibition is structured along a path divided into two registers. On the first floor, in different rooms of the villa, they have been placed large format fileseach dedicated to a theme of living. In these large albums, the plans, sketches and drawings of the architects accompany the many photographs which, extracted from the volume and archive materials, offer themselves to narrate stories, paths and themes. On the top floor, the exhibition offers an overall view that summarizes the parable of the fifty years examined by the volume: they are the homes that the Milanese architects had built for themselves to summarize the evolution of living spaces.
dove: Villa Necchi Campiglio, via Mozart 14, Milan
when: until March 16, 2025
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Source: living.corriere.it
