The multi-disciplinary Gae Aulenti was born in Palazzolo della Stella, close to Venice, in 1927. She studied architecture at Milan Polytechnic University and graduated in 1953 as one of only two female students in a class of 20.
After graduation she worked as a graphic designer at a magazine called Casabella Continuita before becoming a professor at the Venice School of Architecture in 1960 and later at the Milan School of Architecture.
Apart from her career as a graphic designer, professor and architect Aulenti also gained fame as a furniture designer. During the 1960s she produced a great variety of furniture gaining her a prize at the Milan Triennial.
The Pipistrello lamp is essentially a very successful merge of two very different design elements. The streamlined telescopic base with the feel of American design and architecture from the 1930s and the lampshade made as a tribute to the natural forms of fauna and flora of the Art Nouveau movement.
Gae Aulenti designed the Pipistrello lamp in 1965 and went, sketches in hand, to Elio Martinelli who got famous in the 1950s for his innovative lamp-company Martinelli Luce. Seeing the sketches Martinelli immediately agreed to produce the lamp. Originally it was intended for the Olivetti store in Paris but it was such a success it was later put into production.
The smooth shape of the lampshade, looking like the wings of a bat, made Aulenti name it Pipistrello, meaning bat in Italian.
As an architect Gae Aulenti is probably most famous for the transformation in Paris of Gare d’Orsay to Musée d’Orsay. In 2012 she was honored when the Piazza Gae Aulenti was inaugurated in Milan’s most modern neighborhood.
