Q+A #014: Bianca Felicori [Author + Architectural Historian]
📦 Ettore Sottsass Jr.'s Apartment 👓 Worthy of Studio Nizzoli Glasses? 🍂 Arranging Leaves 📖 1950's London Student Magazines 🏛️ Artist and Architect Collabs 💍 Architectural Jewellery
‘Storied Spaces’ is the RIALTO newsletter featuring ‘Q+A’, a bi-weekly column that features guest curators from the community, whom we invite to share inspiration from their home library. In each edit, you will hear from creatives we admire about the analogue inspirations that inform their work and vision.
Bianca Felicori is an author, curator, and architectural historian. She is Head of Research at the Architectural Institute of Paris and Professor at NABA, Milan. She is the founder of Forgotten Architecture, a digital archive and editorial project dedicated to overlooked twentieth-century architecture.
Instagram: @biancafelicori @forgotten__architecture
Q+A
[001] What is your favourite interior you’ve come across?
My favourite interior is undoubtedly the apartment that Ettore Sottsass Jr. designed for the artist Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan between 1965 and 1967. Through my project Forgotten Architecture, I was able to trace the current owner, with whom I gradually became friends. I’ve spent a great deal of time in that apartment, and I even organised the first press conference for my book there.
[002] What is your favourite piece in your collection?
The pair of glasses that Hans Hollein designed for the Austrian Pavilion at the 1968 Triennale (the Austriennale). It’s an extraordinary object, which I bought for a ridiculously low price on Subito.it (the Italian equivalent of eBay) from an elderly architect named Corrado.
In the listing, he had written: “no SMS, no WhatsApp”. When I arrived at his apartment, he decided to test me, asking whether I was familiar with Studio Nizzoli, to see if I was “worthy” of the object. I replied that I had done my very first internship in one of their buildings (the former Domus editorial offices in Rozzano). At that point, he handed me the glasses.
[003] Describe your dream interior.
That’s a difficult question. I’ve been imagining my dream home since I was a child. I used to draw it endlessly on paper, and even in the park, arranging leaves on the ground to sketch its floor plan around the trees. In a way, I think this long-standing obsession guided me toward studying architecture: the desire to imagine my own habitat, to inhabit a space that truly feels like mine.
If I had to answer instinctively, without overthinking it, I would say a large loft in Paris, in Belleville—ideally tucked away on one of those hidden streets where maybe ten people live, in former industrial complexes converted into housing. The interiors would be “as found”, embracing a kind of 1950s New Brutalism: floor-to-ceiling metal bookshelves, a fully metal island kitchen, an enormous sofa, and a dedicated inner room to host the Tawaraya Ring by Memphis.
On the mezzanine, our bedroom, alongside a generous walk-in wardrobe constructed entirely from construction scaffolding. Resin floors, white walls, and wooden bathrooms with large benches (very much in the spirit of John Pawson).
[004] What has piqued your interest lately?
After spending the past year almost entirely confined between home and the library to finish my PhD, I can’t help but talk about it. A doctorate is an incredibly complex journey. The hardest part is identifying a direction: touching on multiple themes without ever fully exhausting them, always situating them in relation to your core research. Very often, when such a long project finally comes to an end, you’re left with an intense desire to dive deeply into certain topics you encountered along the way—subjects you had the chance to discover, but never quite enough.
For instance, I would love to devote time to London’s student magazines of the 1950s, particularly Polygon, the journal of the Regent Street Polytechnic. In its pages, students even invented their own aesthetic language—described as “rolly-polly”, “plonkable”, and “sensual”—as a way of escaping the boredom of postwar Neo-Empiricism in Britain.
[005] Who other than yourself would you trust to decorate your home?
Gae Aulenti <3 if I could turn back time
I. ‘This Is Tomorrow’ Exhibition Catalogue from Whitechapel Galllery
The exhibition catalogue This Is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1956. I purchased it from an elderly gentleman who runs a kind of online catalogue and sells items through Instagram.
This Is Tomorrow represents one of the most significant postwar collaborations between British artists and architects. The curator, Theo Crosby, divided them into twelve groups, each tasked with creating an installation exploring the relationship between art and architecture.
Among the participants were major figures of the second half of the twentieth century, including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson, James Stirling, and Reyner Banham.
II. ‘Gioielli di Architetti’ edited by Barbara Radice
Gioielli di Architetti, a book edited by Barbara Radice dedicated to the collection of jewelry designed by architects assembled by Cleto Munari and published by Electa.
Inside the volume are pieces by renowned figures such as Mario Bellini, Michele De Lucchi, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Richard Meier, Alessandro Mendini, Paolo Portoghesi, Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, Lella Vignelli, and Marco Zanini.
The book showcases how architects — often known for structures and buildings — have translated their design thinking into jewelry. This collection highlights the intersection of architectural concepts with wearable art, revealing how form, proportion, and creative vision can manifest in objects worn on the body.
III. ‘Arte Povera’ by Germano Celant
My beloved book Arte Povera, written by Germano Celant and published by Gabriele Mazzotta Editore in Milan in 1969. The volume is a foundational document of the Arte Povera movement, a groundbreaking strand of contemporary art in Italy that Celant himself defined and promoted.
In this book, he brings together photographs and texts on key works and artists associated with Arte Povera, including figures such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo, and many others.
IG Accounts to follow?
– Casa Futura
– Women Writing Architecture
– Beks Library
– Films Architecture
– Compulsive Archive
