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.

Carlino and Torino

Mollino was born in Turin in 1905. Being a fierce local patriot, he boasted to his friends that he had never spent a night in Milan, located 140 kilometres east from Turin. The two cities have always fought for domination in Northern Italy. Still, Mollino’s relationship with the capital of Piedmont was bittersweet. Critics reacted rather sceptically to his designs (usually located in Turin or on the city’s outskirts). Nowadays,