Alessandro Mendini. Housing, project (Elevation). 1971

Alessandro Mendini Housing, project (Elevation) 1971

  • Not on view

Alessandro Mendini's design for the facade of this house appeared on the cover of the Italian design magazine Casabella, during the international debate sparked by radical architecture in the early 1970s. Mendini's drawings embody two of the opposing views prevalent within the debate: they reveal an architecture of unmediated structures not intellectualized by means of drawing and an architecture that is abstract, conceptual, and full of linguistic references. In this drawing, which shows the front of the house in muted light, Mendini has projected onto the flat facade an image of the elevation of a Greek temple, the lower section and columnar spacing of which determine the proportions and fenestration. Mendini believed that architecture, if connected to the image of ancient construction, could gain in energy and feeling.

Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 106.
Medium
Printed polymer sheet with tape on lithograph
Dimensions
19 7/8 x 22 1/4" (50.5 x 56.5 cm)
Credit
Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation
Object number
1218.2000
Department
Architecture and Design

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].