Gae Aulenti

A must-have monograph on the global legacy of Gae Aulenti, Italy’s pioneering architect and designer.

The most extensive publication to date on Gae Aulenti (1927–2012) accompanies a major retrospective at Triennale Milano in 2024–25. The richly illustrated book includes hundreds of projects—both built and unrealized—and a bibliography of Aulenti’s writings, alongside design documents, drawings, correspondence, and testimonies that capture the complexity of Aulenti’s persona and practice.

In 1972, Aulenti was one of twelve Italian designers commissioned to create a site-specific environment for the groundbreaking exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing her work to a global audience as one of the most forward-thinking voices in her field. She realized major projects, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where she led the conversion of the former railway station into one of the world’s most renowned museums; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona; and in Tokyo, where her refined and scenographic approach to exhibition design met wide acclaim. Retracing Aulenti’s contributions across architecture, design, theater, and exhibition making, this book sheds new light on a figure central to shaping Italian and international visual culture in the second half of the twentieth century.Giovanni Agosti is a professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Milan. A leading scholar of the Italian Renaissance, Agosti’s curatorial and academic work includes major studies on artists such as Andrea Mantegna (culminating in a landmark exhibition at the Louvre), Bernardino Luini, and Gaudenzio Ferrari, as well as significant publications on Giovanni Testori and Italian theater.