Italo Calvino said that Torino is a city that invites to rigour, linearity, and through logic opens up to folly.
It is possible to trace design itineraries, more unconventional compared to the active automotive sector, which paved the way to sophisticated experiments responding to the needs of cultured clients, both private and companies. Carlo Mollino was among the main interpreters of this attitude, suspended between the scientific rigour of Rationalism and the new forms of expressive freedom. The Museo Casa Mollino is a biographical and poetic insight into the privacy of his home, and Dancing Le Roi, an extremely charming place designed in 1959 for Attilio Lutrario, clearly witnesses his vision. The late 1950s were marked by the rise of the Neoliberty style, expressing a critical approach to the International Style, through a language responsive to local tradition.
Paradigmatic of this controversial shift is the formal architecture of the Borsa Valori (Stock Exchange) building and the Bottega d'Erasmo residential building by Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, built between 1952 and 1956, now clearly visible from the outside. Another set of experiments took shape by the end of the 1960s, such as the revolutionary furnishing of the Piper Pluriclub by Pietro Derossi, Giorgio Ceretti and Riccardo Rosso, which included elements of ‘Programmed Art’ by Bruno Munari and Sergio Liberovici and Piero Gilardi’s Nature-carpets. And then the range of design objects produced by Gufram, icons of the Italian Radical Design and Pop movement, which originated ephemeral environments no longer existing, and that now have become iconic objects of collection, often displayed inside galleries and modernism and vintage stores (such as Alkimya and Entropia Design). Among these objects are Bocca, the lips-shaped sofa designed by Studio 65 in 1970, Pratone armchair designed by Derossi, Ceretti and Rosso in 1971, and the Cactus coat hanger designed by Drocco and Mello in 1972.
Inside Museo Abet Laminati in Bra there is the largest collection of furnishing elements produced by the Memphis group, a collective of Italian designers successful in the post-modernist scene of the 1980s, clearly influenced by the genius of Ettore Sottsass, who studied architecture at Politecnico di Torino where he could benefit from Achille Castiglioni’s lessons when the latter chaired, from 1971 to 1980, the course of "Artistic design for industry".
And, finally, Castello del Valentino, now headquarters of the Department of Architecture and Design of Politecnico and home to a selection of design objects and furniture of the 20th century, both from Italy and all over the world.