Carlo Mollino: Arabesques

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Arabesques is a celebration of the life and achievements of Carlo Mollino --architect, designer, author and photographer, and one of Italy's most extraordinary cultural innovators. In a 100 color and 80 black and white illustrations, and with commentary by an array of contemporary Mollino scholars, it examines his famously elegant furniture designs, a selection of his most iconic buildings, his wonderfully futuristic aeroplane and automobile designs and a portfolio of his photographic portraits of women. It reveals a man almost impossible to grasp in his entirety, with a ravenous intellect and a temperament both friendly and proud, whose work requires the attentions of several scholars--among them Lisa Ponti, Carmen Guererro and Fulvio Ferrari--to assess here. Yet Mollino's approach was itself often synthetic; his interiors integrated his furniture, interior design and architecture towards a unified aesthetic environment, expressing a coherent aesthetic of elegance and energetic sinuousness. Arabesques makes sense of this rare instance of a true Renaissance man, and will sweep the reader up in Mollino's infectious energy and polymorphous genius.