“Whatever you design, whether it is an interior, a piece of furniture, or merely a stage set, must always contain the promise of a whole city,” the Italian architect Gae Aulenti told Architectural Digest for a story about her Milanese apartment in 1990.
By that point, she had turned a train station in Paris into the Musée d’Orsay, designed galleries at the Centre Pompidou, and restored the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. But in 1965, after a 10-year stint crafting the visual identity of Casabella magazine, she was still working on a smaller scale—creating residential interiors and furniture to inhabit them. This was the year she conceived the so-called Jumbo table, a square slab of marble that rests on what resemble four extruded dumbbells. Set at 45-degree angles, those legs lent the heavyweight table structural heft. It’s one of several dozen pieces that star in the Aulenti retrospective on view at the Triennale Milano through January 12, 2025.
The precise inspiration for this subtly postmodern form isn’t clear. “Jumbo reflects her interiors in those years,” muses Nina Artioli, Aulenti’s granddaughter and the director of her archive. “In a lot of the houses she designed, the table was of great importance—always very big. It wasn’t just a design piece but a structural element for the house.”
