Cerruti 1881 Showroom, Paris

project
1967
construction
1967
client

Cerruti, Nino

description
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This store marked the beginning of a long collaboration between Magistretti and the stylist Nino Cerruti, a collaboration that was to lead to more designs for the most important Cerruti stores in very different urban contexts: the suburban Somma Lombardo (1975), the central Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan (1976), and other venues in Vienna (1977), Tokyo (1984), Teheran (1976), Osaka (1981) and London (1986). The architect interpreted Cerruti's request to "establish a clearly identifiable 'image'" that the successful prototype in Paris tried to turn into "a purely contemporary figurative expression", because "in short, the objective of design is to use its modest adherence to reality to contribute to the creation of customs and a contemporary society that expresses itself in a simple, direct and never flashy manner, one which slowly enters into everyone's lives through objects and furniture and creates the habit of seeing things for what they are". Magistretti's professional partnership with Cerruti pursued this objective during the design of several stores which also included the project for the stylist's apartment in Milan (1968). Their partnership ended in 2003, towards the end of Magistretti's career, when the architect designed the company's offices in Biella.

The attempt to move in the direction of contemporaneity is clearly visible in the sculptural volume of the sinusoidal staircase leading to the three upper floors of the showroom in Place de ala Madeleine. Numerous bright-coloured ink sketches - illustrating Magistretti's drawing method - reveal that the stairs were laboriously inserted in the centre of the "meander restricted by gypsum, wood and iron structures" of the building. Their key role was emphasised by the hollowing-out of the corner of the ground floor between the square and Rue Royal, transformed into a porphyry paved portico (a continuance of the adjacent pavement); here Magistretti placed the elegant shop windows with their torch-fired metal frames, custom-made in Italy. This design involving placing the entrance right next to the stairs, further emphasised by the unique, smooth, mirror-finish gypsum which not only recalled but also reinterpreted the pre-existing internal decorations. The shaped openings in the load-bearing slabs next to the stairs not only help to create a unitary image of the internal volume, but also enable interpretation of the complex spatiality of the showroom even when standing as far away as the road.

Magistretti focuses thoughtfully on the furnishings, a calibrated combination of his iconic pieces (lamps, tables, chairs, already manufactured for companies like Cassina and Artemide) and ad hoc objects designed specifically for this venue. For example, the wheeled containers for coats and clothes (two different heights) that became a key feature of the variable interior. They could easily be shifted depending on how the clothes were to be displayed, and could also be moved from one floor to another thanks to a lift clearly custom-built to transport them; he constantly redesigned these containers and also produced endless variations of sales counters which, at the scale of the individual piece of furniture, reflected the theme of the empty corner, already architecturally introduced by the portico. He continued to design them until he found what he was looking for: a black lacquer interior and leather-bound exterior, reminiscent of the material for the dressing rooms.

bibliography

La forma della funzione, in Design Habitat, settembre 1973

V. Magistretti, Relazione di progetto, Showroom Cerruti 1881, Parigi, 1967

Vico Magistretti a Parigi. Il centro styling Cerruti 1881, in Domus 462, maggio 1968, pp. 33-40.

project profile by Maria Manuela Leoni
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