The Cabina wardrobe by Aldo Rossi

Its shape and stripes are imprinted in the imagination of the Italian summer, the vintage-flavored one of the 50s and 60s and of the first family holidays in the newborn beach resorts.
Aldo Rossi - one of the greatest Italian architects of the twentieth century, born in the 30s - used to frequent the Island of Elba as a boy, where the beaches were dotted with wooden cabins in Mediterranean colors, and their simple shapes accompanied him throughout his career. In the 80s, the cabins of those memories became the synthesis of a container space with clean lines, an "architectural archetype".




In 1980, the prototype of La Cabina dell’Elba was Aldo Rossi’s first furnishing project for Molteni&C - Rossi had designed and built the Molteni family’s funeral chapel in the same years, but had not yet approached the design of furnishing pieces. With the Cabina dell’Elba project, however, one can perceive his aptitude for conceiving furniture as domestic architecture. Presented at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 1980, La Cabina dell’Elba remained a prototype produced in only four examples by the Brianza-based company, but from 1982 it became part of the production of Bruno Longoni’s Atelier in Cantù.


courtesy Garage Bentivoglio

Aldo Rossi wrote ten years later: “The cabin is a small thing, it is the reduction of the house, it is the idea of ​​the house.” And in fact, a house within a house, the cabin is a simple storage wardrobe, with a single door, lacquered in different colors and with two drawers and a shelf inside, in addition to the clothes hanger bar and some internal hooks.




But what makes it precious is precisely the architectural and formal synthesis of such an iconic element of the seaside landscape, such as to abstract it and bring it into the domestic landscape.
 

This mastery of design by Aldo Rossi has led the Cabina to become part of prestigious collections and to be included in exhibitions such as Reality 80 at Palazzo delle Stelline (2018-19), at Triennale Milano and at the Museo del Novecento in Milan on the occasion of the solo exhibition ALDO ROSSI. DESIGN 1960-1997, both in 2022, and to also be the protagonist of an exhibition entirely dedicated to it: Aldo Rossi. Cabina dell’Elba, at the Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura gallery, between 2022 and 2023. Finally, throughout the month of July 2024, at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna, the small exhibition Cabine dell'Elba, 1982 has enhanced and consecrated the cabin as a collector's item, to be admired beyond the windows of the Garage Bentivoglio and contemplate the timeless design left to us by one of the greatest masters of Italian architecture, capable of giving shape to an icon with the simplest of gestures.



Geometria dell'estate, 1983