On a concrete house full of free love – for nature, the avant-garde, for creative expression – built in gloomy times, and demolished in contemporary ones.
During my architecture studies, Jan Szpakowicz was for me a star on the order of Kurt Cobain, and the unassuming house that he designed in the 1960s in Zalesie Dolne near Warsaw, where he lived with his family until he left for France in 1992, was a real discovery.
A golden child, a son overshadowed by his father; an architect, decorator, constructor, aerobatic pilot, racing driver, photographer. He was Carlo Mollino.
“Creating architecture and fist-fighting: to him, those things were the issue of morality; he had no material issues to worry about,” wrote Carlo Mollino in 1933 about his alter ego, Ettore Lavazza, aka Oberon. The Life of Oberon was a fictional biography of a nearly 30-year-old eccentric architect from Turin, who lived beautifully and died young. The novel, published in the 1930s in an Italian architecture magazine Casabella, was an account of Mollino’s fascination with death and what comes afterwards. He grappled with this topic for his whole – as it turned out, rather long – life.
