Interview with architect Nanda Vigo

AB

I want to start by talking about your time in America. What drove you to go to Frank Lloyd Wright?
NV

The Fallingwater house. All us artists found it fascinating, not just the architects, we thought it was exceptional when in reality it was a sham. The client had wanted it that way and early on Frank Lloyd Wright was actually against it. After that, I saw all his work in a new light, even his furniture which had seemed so different now looked like a bad copy of the Vienna secession style painted white. I thought the Guggenheim was appalling as well, it was the beginning of those architects who claim to be making a sculpture and then there is no actual exhibition space inside. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but it’s absurd to look at paintings in an uphill/downhill layout.
AB

Yes, I’ve been. I also read that the design for the Guggenheim came from another project that Lloyd Wright had made for a garage.
NV

Yes, everybody marvelled at it but it was the first of these sculpture-works, the most recent of which is Zaha Hadid’s building in Rome which is also appalling. Full of catwalks but lacking exhibition space, there are only two or three rooms.
AB

I’m intrigued by the Mies Van der Rohe matter: the fact that you initially wanted to go to the IIT in Chicago, only later changing your mind and choosing Taliesin and FLW. Your work remained closer to van de Rohe than Lloyd Wright though.
NV

Yes, I ended up with them and then luckily I stopped in San Francisco after Taliesin West. It was very prolific creatively speaking, it is the most cultured city in America.
AB

What year were you there in?
NV

Late ’58-’59.
AB

San Francisco is the city of start-ups now, it might not be as culturally alive as you found it back then.
NV

Everything changes, but there was a real creative foundation back then. The flower children, everyone was a writer. Then there was this particular street from which you could hear the most beautiful jazz because the shops below kept their doors open. I used to listen to it almost every night, it was just so much fun.
AB

And then you started working there.
NV

Yes, I did apprenticeships in two or three studios.
AB

How long were you there for? A year?
NV

Yes, it was hard to find artisans who would make prototypes. Everybody worked as though it was an assembly line and they lost it if you interrupted them.
AB

Was there perhaps an artisan in Italy who could have made them for you?
NV

Yes, but in the early years, towards the 70’s, companies would simply say “the client wants this or that” and so you were obliged to do this or that. If you wanted to work with them, you had to reset the project to fit the market.
AB

You initially worked as an architect when you returned to Italy.
NV

Yes, I worked with some engineers with whom I designed the skyscraper cemetery in Rozzano. It was ’59.

Fontana had already mentioned Mack to me in ’59, but Manzoni wouldn’t let me get in touch with him, I was absolutely banned from organising exhibitions. As soon as he died, I started doing the things I was interested in.

AB

How did you start making works of art?
NV

It happened because even a sample design object must obey certain rules, in art I immediately found a new degree of freedom.
SB

Perhaps it was also that started to move with an artistic crowd?
NV

No, I was already spending time with them, it was just that I could talk to them, we spoke the same language.
AB

I know you met Fontana by spontaneously visiting his studio, where you later organised an exhibition of Gruppo Zero work. Were you back in Milan then?
NV

No, that was ’64.
AB

Not much is known about your curatorial work. How did you come into contact with Gruppo Zero?
NV

Fontana had already mentioned Mack to me in ’59, but Manzoni wouldn’t let me get in touch with him, I was absolutely banned from organising exhibitions. As soon as he died, I started doing the things I was interested in. Mack and Uecker had had solo shows in Italy but there had never been an exhibition of work by the whole group and I thought it had to be done. So, since I had an exhibition in Holland at the time, I started driving around in my station wagon…
Laughter
NV

I loaded work into my car from Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Denmark. Then I came back to Milan and Fontana said “do it in my studio”.
AB

I would like to understand more about your relationship with Piero Manzoni, especially the fact that he wasn’t very pleased about your interest in art.
NV

I don’t want to talk about this too much, this whole Manzoni thing has become a bit of a ball and chain.
Laughter
NV

He had no problem with me being involved in the artistic discourse, but he didn’t want me to organise exhibitions and he wouldn’t let me work. In fact, he went even further than that: when we were finishing the publications of the marriage, he bribed me. I was still at the studio of the engineers who I had worked with on the cemetery and he said “Leave the studio or we won’t get married”. I didn’t accept this. There were fights, splits and then he died a few months later.
AB

Am I right in thinking there weren’t many women in that crowd?
NV

No, there weren’t.
AB

Looking now at how it is accepted, it feels normal but I don’t think it was like that back then.
NV

It was extremely oppressive, nobody wanted women to work. We were blackmailed constantly.
AB

You mentioned Zaha Hadid earlier, she didn’t like to discuss her work in these terms either. Especially in the world of architecture…
NV

…it’s not that different.

I went to meet Gio Ponti precisely because he had this vision of the total integration of art and architecture. Nobody was speaking about that at the time. I said to myself, “at least I’ll realise if I’m mad or if effectively there might be something to this”.

AB

To change the subject, I went round Gio Ponti’s churches in Milan and I saw some revolutionary details, such as the entrance on the long side of the church at the San Borromeo hospital. Ponti was also very sensitive to innovation in the artistic field, so much so that he was one of the first to exhibit industrial design and arte povera together. What was Ponti’s role in your career?
NV

I went to meet him precisely because he had this vision of the total integration of art and architecture. Nobody was speaking about that at the time. I said to myself, “at least I’ll realise if I’m mad or if effectively there might be something to this”. He had been working towards the total look since the 30’s, he designed anything from a glass to a piece of architecture. He also liked painting and every so often he would include some painting.
AB

Yes, you can see that in the church.
NV

I’ll tell you something else. All my colleagues used to look at me horrified, saying “how can you talk to those people?”. They thought they were old, passé. They used an awful word to describe Ponti: eclectic. It wasn’t like that, it was something else entirely.
AB

The other day I was looking at an exhibition from Turin in ’66. It was called Arte Abitabile (Inhabitable Art) and it revealed how artists were interested in design to the point of considering it as an antagonist. How did you experience the relation between being an artist and doing exhibitions with others who were, in a certain sense, ‘anti-design’, such as Archizoom and Piero Gilardi for example?
NV

I knew what they were doing because they were my friends but it was out of my research area, probably because I was already connected to Ponti.
AB

He was a bit interested in arte povera, wasn’t he?
NV

I always say that he was 360° open. If there was a new, young art then he wanted to exhibit it, he was very generous. These people, Fontana too, had a deep generosity. Today’s so-called artists wouldn’t know anything about that.
AB

Would you tell me about the Beetle Under the Leaf house? I wanted to photograph it so I contacted Meneguzzo, who owns it now, but he refused because the exterior hadn’t been renovated.
NV

I’ve said that I don’t want to see it again.
AB

Why is that?
NV

Because a collector who wants a Ponti house can’t just destroy it because they want a bit of extra cash. They should sell it whole as it is, they can’t just take bits of it like the idiots who buy my houses, with work by Fontana and Castellani inside, and sell them straight away. Somebody who claims to be a collector and make a museum should understand that, but no, last year he wanted to sell something and of all the things he chose the Castellani which costs a bomb. I never received a percentage and it was a nightmare.
AB

Why, did the client buy the work separately?
NV

Yes, but the work was designed specifically for this construction.
AB

The structure of the house already existed?
NV

No, it was published in Domus and Ponti was willing to give the plans to anybody who wanted to build it. The only person who responded was this surveyor from Malo.
AB

Was he a collector?
NV

No, he became one later. He had started to buy at random, I explained what was worth his attention. Since he knew I was a friend of Ponti, he asked the architect if I could work on the interior. I was still quite young, I got to his studio with my little plans and I didn’t know what to say.
Laughter
NV

He told me he didn’t want to see anything and that I should show it to him when it was finished. So that’s how we did it.
AB

You felt free then.
NV

Yes, I did what I wanted and he really liked it. In fact, since it wasn’t very big and it was supposed to be for a family with two children, I put a double bed in the middle of the sitting room that also became a sofa or a seat. He said that only a woman could have created this ‘nativity room’.
AB

Then there’s the staircase in faux fur…
NV

I added that. It was a ground-floor house and seeing as he was starting to collect, we made a space on the floor above for this purpose.

I did what I wanted and he really liked it. In fact, house wasn’t very big and it was supposed to be for a family with two children, I put a double bed in the middle of the sitting room that also became a sofa or a seat. He said that only a woman could have created this ‘nativity room’.

AB

The other day I was looking at an atrium that you designed for the Triennale in Milan, can you tell me more about it? I know that it was rather a tense contest, and Battiato was involved too.
NV

It was ’73. The atriums at the Triennale had always been these enormous, monumental things, almost fascist in style. It annoyed me and I imagined a single large space that could host conferences and performances etc. I was not viewed well by the old director.
AB

No?
NV

No, because musicians and artists had never come to the Triennale to exhibit in that way, then of course I was a woman and that disturbed him. It was all at my own expense, even the invitations, and Franco Battiato was involved in one of the performances.
AB

With his band?
NV

No, just him and his guitar. Nobody knew who he was in those years, we were friends and he came for free. When he arrived to play, the director started saying there was no emergency exit. It’s exactly the same as it is now, bear in mind. He just made it up to interrupt the concert, he even called the police commissioner of Milan. Now, Franco is extremely intelligent and he just sat down, there were already people there, and he played a mute chorus.
Laughter
AB

Fantastic.
NV

Yes. Then twenty years later Battiato held this huge concert and I didn’t even manage to say hello to him. There was so much security.
AB

So you never saw him again?
NV

Yes, we saw each other in Sicily. But I wanted to see him at that occasion to remind us of what had happened at the Triennale.
AB

I wanted to ask about your relationship with fashion since Milan is one of its capitals. What are your points of convergence?
NV

I have always liked Japanese designers.
AB

Such as?
NV

Miyake, Yamamoto sometimes.
AB

But you’ve never had…
NV

…I designed some shops for Ferretti.
AB

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it but there was a Fendi show where they reconstructed the staircase from the Beetle Under the Leaf house that you created with Ponti.
NV

No.
AB

I don’t know if they ever said where they got it from, I was wondering if it had been…
NV

Oh please.
Laughter

Back in the 70’s, I held an exhibition with photos of my travels and raised this topic. Everybody said “What does it mean, what is it?” and so I gave up there.

AB

I would like to know more about your last work, Exoteric Gate, at Statale and this new theme of spirituality.
NV

It is not a new theme. It is something that has always remained kept on the downlow because it is complicated to do. It is very hard to express something in our work, philosophical solutions only make it worse.
AB

When did you become interested in this theme?
NV

It follows on from everything that I was seeking, which it was impossible for me to talk about. Back in the 70’s, I held an exhibition with photos of my travels and raised this topic. Everybody said “What does it mean, what is it?” and so I gave up there. It is only now that I have allowed myself to use the title Exoteric Gate, because a lot of people are starting to looks at things in this sense and so I said “ok, you can start talking about it.”
AB

So, can your older work be interpreted from this perspective as well?
NV

They are connected themes, they go together. I didn’t realise at the beginning, but I definitely included something, it was almost spontaneous.
AB

How do you work now?
NV

As I always have, I draw the designs and then I have artisans with whom I’ve worked for over 40 years who know what I need.