DUE TO THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED
A reading from Shaw’s forthcoming book, The Mollino Set, about his research on the Italian architect Carlo Mollino. Comparable to a Bond villain, Mollino drew simultaneously with both hands, wrote a treatise on downhill skiing, engineered and drove race cars at Le Mans, was a stunt pilot, and the designer of what was until very recently the most expensive piece of furniture ever bought at auction. Come hear what happens when Shaw begins to look more closely into the life and times of Mollino as he pursues his unconventional book project.
"Chronicling on-site research commissioned from me by a mysterious Belgian graphic designer, The Mollino Set tracks the Italian architect Carlo Mollino (1905-73), who designed the bulbous and baroque space of the Turin opera house, a set of windowless fantasy interiors in the city that may have functioned primarily as photographic backdrops, and several extreme Alpine structures, including an under-the-Matterhorn chalet for the then fastest man on skis, Leo Gasperl. Comparable perhaps to a Bond villain, Mollino drew simultaneously with both hands, wrote a treatise on downhill skiing, engineered and drove race cars at Le Mans, was a stunt pilot, and the designer of what was until very recently the most expensive piece of furniture ever bought at auction. The more I looked into the emerging Mollino industry, however, the more it developed an unhealthy curiosity about me. And so this book documents my descent into the world of the “risotto giallo”—a northern Italian variant of the country’s thriller genre, a surprisingly dangerous domain of tyrant art collectors, car and motorcycle chases, and conceptual double-crosses, all presided over by Italian film music and the lush surfaces of mid-century modern furniture. " --Lytle Shaw
The Mollino Set (forthcoming, 2020) is the third in a series of architecture-centered prose works that began with The Clifford Chadwick Clifford Collection (2011) and The Moiré Effect (2012).
Beyond this architecture series, Lytle Shaw’s books include two books of poetry—Cable Factory 20 (1999) and The Lobe (2002), two books documenting his collaboration with the artist J. Blachly—The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008) and Selected Shipwrecks (2012), and three critical monographs: Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013) and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018). Shaw is professor of English at New York University, and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.
Sponsored by: The Departments of Art, Art History & Design; English; History and The College of Arts & Sciences