Word: aulenti
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Orsay was by far the largest job of Aulenti's career, involving thousands of drawings during six years of almost daily discussion with the museum's staff. Born near Udine into a family she calls "minor intellectual nobility," Aulenti, 59, honed her sense of design during ten years on the staff of the architectural magazine Casabella, and made her name as a designer in 1969 with her Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. "In one way, she's a great success as an architect," says Italy's leading architecture critic, Bruno Zevi, who considers her work inspired and sensitive...
...Usually when you build a new museum, you go get some new land," Aulenti says. "To build, you must have land. Here, this old building was my new land. There are two ways to look at an old building: historically, as a monument or structure, and geographically. My way is geographic." No internal structure could abolish or convincingly mask the "geographic" form of the Gare d'Orsay. Instead, Aulenti set out to work with it as a given fact, making a new building that encourages constant reference to the old while scrupulously reflecting in its layout the narrative lines...
Along the avenue, portals framed in warm black terrazzo give access to the internal galleries. Here, Aulenti has done marvels with adjustment of scale to image. Each space suits its contents, whether one is looking at Daumier's 36 clay caricature heads of the Celebrites du Juste- Milieu, no bigger than grenades and as lethal, whose passionate violations of the human face would so deeply affect Giacometti a century later, or at the large, suave, marmoreal forms of Ingres and early neoclassical Jean-Leon Gerome...
...fact, Aulenti has done more than collaborate. Both on the ground floor and in the upper galleries, she has set up a constant dialogue of detail between her building and Laloux's. The limestone screens on which major paintings hang, inserted into Laloux's iron arches, have segments cut out of them through which one glimpses vistas of the original building. Laloux's space is "quoted" by breaches, angles, slippages, unexpected openings; no room is wholly enclosed, yet the effect is never choppy or distracting. Its essential medium always is light. Orsay is theatrical only at one point, where...
...rest of the building, natural light is Aulenti's main subject. Her use of it reaches its peak of tact and skill in the galleries for impressionism and postimpressionism at the top of the museum, fitted into the dead space between facade and vault. This parade of rooms, with its 30 or so Van Goghs, its nearly 40 Cezannes, its Monets and Manets and Renoirs, its superb array of Degas bronzes, is bound to be the popular core of the museum, and Aulenti was right to put it up high, closest to the light. "Light is impressionism," she says...