The organizers of Milan’s annual Internazionale Salone del Mobile (iSaloni) are tapping into what might be the biggest dream of architecture aficionados everywhere: to peek inside the living spaces where renowned architects return after a day of designing all varieties of spaces, residential and otherwise. An exhibition devoted to the interiors inhabited by some of architecture’s most illustrious designers, “Where Architects Live,” opens in conjunction with iSaloni on April 8 at pavilion 9 on the Rho Milan Fairgrounds. The show seeks to represent not only where the architects under consideration live, but also how they live. Staged as part of the largest interior design and furniture fair in the world, “Where Architects Live” emphasizes the proximity of the architecture and design disciplines and explores “the art of living today, with a close look at the people who are changing the face of our cities, the configuration of the global landscape, and the collective imagination,” said iSaloni president Claudio Luti in a press release.
In order to survey and document the personal spaces of the exhibition’s subjects, curator Francesca Molteni and scenographer Davide Pizzigoni visited Zaha Hadid at her apartment in London, Daniel Libeskind in New York, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas in Paris, David Chipperfield in Berlin, Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27 in Rio de Janeiro, Mario Bellini in Milan, Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai in the countryside outside his firm’s namesake city, and this year’s Pritzker winner, Shigeru Ban, in Tokyo. For the show, which runs through April 13, Molteni and Pizzigoni will display photographs of the interiors, video and audio footage of interviews with the architects, and reproductions of furniture in the designers’ homes, in order to recreate specific rooms.
Visitors hoping to understand sources of inspiration for Hadid and her peers will be richly rewarded. A photograph of the Dame’s living room shows a Donald Judd stack sculpture among her own early neo-Suprematist paintings, references that are digested as undulating, geometric forms in Hadid’s current work. Likewise, the Fuksases decorate their apartment on the Place des Vosges in Paris with original Jean Prouve chairs — their professional predilection for clean lines translates into personal preference. Libeskind, meanwhile, decorates with Le Corbusier chairs. Some of the architects designed their own homes from scratch, creating environments that epitomize their aesthetic and programmatic hallmarks. Ban, for example, built his 2007 house in Tokyo’s Hangei Forest district without felling a single tree, and it’s numerous ovoid cutouts serve both to accommodate surrounding foliage and affirm his commitment to sustainable and conscientious architecture. Taken in concert, the homes show the formal differences among the profiled designers, but underscore their shared devotion to the design practice. All the personal rooms are meticulously neat — not a single cushion or throw is out of place — suggesting that these architects spend more time in the office than they do at home.
The architectural profession infamously offers little by way of work/life balance — many designers spend such long days in the studio that the aesthetic organization of space becomes a task unto itself, a compulsion that affects every facet of the architect’s daily life. In other creative professions the old adage that life imitates art might hold true, but existence and practice often become one and the same in architecture. As the interiors of “Where Architects Live” suggest, for the world’s most famous designers, life is architecture.
