Carlo Mollino and 'The Australian Wall'

Carlo Mollino was a legendarily idiosyncratic architect, furniture and interior designer, writer and photographer, who dipped a toe into automobile design just once, for a unique ‘bisiluro’ car that competed at LeMans in 1955. I recently wrote an article about Mollino for The Automobile magazine, my favorite print mag about old vehicles, which is not averse to motorcycle content. The article took deep research, because little has been written about his LeMans racer in context of Mollino’s whole career and life: he was stylish and secretive, absurdly gifted yet unmotivated by success, built only a baker’s dozen buildings and a few hundred pieces of furniture (which now sells for $Millions), and never showed the extraordinary photographs he took of women between 1950-1973, that are now inextricably linked with his overall legacy.

In the course of my research, I came across Mollino’s only overlap with motorcycles: a 1933 fictional story with accompanying illustrations for Casabella magazine (that’s House Beautiful in Italian, but oh so different than the American version), called ‘The Life of Oberon.’  Oberon was a fictional architect who died young, and is clearly a fantasy alter ego for Mollino: Oberon is the son of a wealthy merchant, just as Mollino was the son of a wealthy engineer/architect: “Well-to-do from his father’s trading business, Oberon could have pursued the untouchable splendor of a crown prince.” (‘The Life of Oberon, Part II’, Casabella Aug/Sep 1933).  Mollino’s own father called him a ‘feckless good for nothing’, as he never established a real architecture or design business, instead keeping a desk at his father’s firm his entire life, with a small brass plaque announcing his own limited practice.  And Oberon’s first work of architecture was an ‘Australian Wall’, or Wall of Death, built for an acrobat in Sydney, Australia.

And yet, Carlo Mollino is a legend today, and his buildings, like the recently renovated Teatro Regio Opera House in Turin, stand as unique and beloved stand-ins for the charming man himself.  In my article for The Automobile, I call him ‘an Italian Batman’: a rich bon vivant renowned for his modernistic work and love for the ladies, who kept enormous secrets, like his series of garçonniers (bachelor pads) that he never slept in, but decorated in his own inscrutable style, in which he photographed Turinese streetwalkers (fetched by his chauffer) semi-nude, draped around his erotic hypermodern furniture, in costumes Mollino collected for the purpose.

From 1960-73 Mollino used only Polaroids for his photographs, and his final 1300 images are stunning, rivaling the idiosyncratic work of fashion photographers working in a similar genre decades later, like Helmut Newton. Unlike his other work, Carlo Mollino was too far ahead of the curve with his photography, hence his decision not to share or publish it.  In the 1960s, photos of semi-nude women in powerful poses, staring down the camera, were still considered pornography in many countries.  Mollino preferred his legacy remain in the realm of Art, so hid his photos from judgemental eyes: they only appeared in the 1980s, long after his death, when the world was actually ready to see them as the extraordinary body of work they are.

Carlo Mollino was hooked by the Wall of Death around 1930, when he took photographs of the traveling Troupe Mater, working a carnival in one of Turin’s many plazas.  Naturally, Mollino’s principal subject was Wall rider ‘Miss Eitel’ (so attributed in Mollino’s files – actually her name was Lina Zavatta), who can be seen balancing her Indian 101 Scout on the bally in front of the Wall.  With her smoky gaze, zaggy striped sweater, and deaths-head gauntlet gloves, she cut quite a figure: a woman perfumed by danger, and a rebel entertainer in the age of Fascism: think Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, or its popular film derivative Cabaret.  The other thrills of the Wall of Death act were not lost on Mollino, who was inspired by the Wall’s astonishing gravity-defying drama and its associated surround-sound to make it the subject of the first chapter of his first novel, ‘The Life of Oberon’, published in Casabella magazine in four parts, between July to November 1933.

The story begins with a note from Casabella that is something of an obituary, explaining ‘the architect Mollino was a dear friend of Ettore Lavazza (Oberon) in his final years.’  What part of Mollino died with Oberon?  We can only guess, but simultaneous with the story’s publication, Mollino took his first architectural commission, designing the offices of the Provincial Fascist Union of Farmers, in a style reminiscent of Erich Mendelsohn, for whom Mollino interned in Berlin in 1931.  Mollino, it should be noted, never shared a political opinion, joined any party, or supported any war effort: a luxury available only to the very wealthy in Mussolini’s Italy.

For your enjoyment, and courtesy the Museo Carlo Mollino in Turin, in whose book ‘Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller’ (2022) we find the first-ever English translation of The Life of Oberon, reproduced here with illustrations from the book, as well as images from ‘Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1934-1973’ (2018, Sylvana Editoriale):

‘The Life of Oberon: the Australian Wall’, by Carlo Mollino (Casabella, July 1933)

It came into being on a summer sea crossing, and was so named by Oberon, to whom terse words came easily to clothe thoughts and brainwaves. On warm evenings, the acrobats thought up acts bound by a hair’s breadth to the laws of physics governing our arduous earthly movements. They are always trying to cheat these grievous laws and, upon making a discovery, work for months in great secrecy to fabricate a sensational demonstration congenial to the unfocused bourgeois spectator.
Ciro Beck was a formidable inventor who had already outdone his Japanese master, who professed the mystique of acrobats and sold his breakthroughs for fabulous prices. All this was in the glory days of the circus. Oberon met Ciro Beck on a return trip from Europe in 1925. Few circuses still survived there, struggling and united in four huge convoys around that monstrous degeneration that is the three-ring circus. Ciro Beck was returning home laid off; his circus had gone down the drain and sold everything, down to the last lion cub. A disenchanted audience was no longer interested, and – lightheaded on gasoline – laughed mercilessly at the pink jersey of the female rider and her white horses bowing to schmaltzy Strauss waltzes. Real horses, not racing ones, were about to become prehistoric beasts, only to be reborn idealized in the lights of the myth; crazed among ruins against the desperate skylines of early De Chirico paintings.

The scattered acrobats, gripped by hunger and swallowing their caste pride, submitted to the abjection of theirs derided act, stuck between the refined speaker and a brazen ditty in the sleaziest of variety theaters. Gone were the days when any self-respecting acrobat travelled in a sleeping car and had a valet. Now they roll about in 3rd class with un-initialed travelling cases, and carry their own fiber suitcases, panting. At the thought of such decadence (which placed him behind the chalky and stigmatized thighs of the now countless roving sisters), Ciro Beck turned mean, and it was in this indignant mood beneath the tropical sky that he thought up a challenge: a wall of danger regaining the hope of celebrity, with a flash of genius.

Oberon understood, and saw architecture. We do not know what words he used to describe his vision to Ciro Beck that evening. The star players share an unfathomable ability to communicate, by virtue of which they recognize, understand, and even hate each other. The third party present – another acrobat – was the ‘Club Man’, and grasped nothing of the prodigy born that evening in Ciro Beck’s burning brain, and become Art in Oberon’s vision. Moaning – he was always slightly drunk – he started blaming utopia, and bringing up crowd psychology as counterproof to a psychology he no longer understood. The elegant old man, mindful of the heydays, remained stubborn a circus purist. All he had done for 40 years was juggle clubs before a docile and stunned audience. He had reached the maximum number possible – 9 clubs – and he had grown old with the illusion that the audience was always the same good kid. Slowly he become an alcoholic, having lost his sure hand, and miserably scaled down a club a month. Even on board, he insisted on juggling the clubs, and had he been allowed, would have reduced himself to just one club before a jeering audience, or perhaps no clubs – just photographs – an aggravated example of a living dreamer of unforgotten fame.

Behind an eager client lies always, like a shadow, a devil Incarnate in the form of a servant, lover, or wife’s man-friend, and so ‘one of the family’. They take it upon themselves to adopt delaying tactics simply for the fun of it: they speak of ridiculous, crazy, fashionable, of things that look good on paper but then… and profess their aesthetics even if they trade in stock, even if they are gentlemen. When an architect is sure that he has ‘turned’ his client and sees him departing filled with the al- modern dream, he may tremble because the client may return the next time gloomy and evasive, and all is gone to rack and ruin. Then, the intelligent architect must remember the devil Incarnate and immediately take radical steps, just as Oberon did. The angel of evil also appeared in the distant tropics, alongside a dreamy Ciro Beck, in the guise of Old Club Man. Oberon instantly recognized him, thanks to a secret sense, and straightaway heard him lying with the prose of a stylish old man. There was no time to lose, and he jumped up and whispered in his ear. What was Oberon’s spell? We know not, but perhaps with calm conviction he asked him to jump into the sea: Oberon never threatened. The Old Club Man asked the ‘right time’, slowly stood up and, gibbering – he was always slightly drunk – about some odd appointment, disappeared forever into the darkness. That was Oberon’s first crime.

There, that same night in his cabin, and before the idea rotted, he drew the first sketch of the Australian Wall before Ciro Beck’s shining eyes.  It was one of those dreadful and renowned ‘madman sketches’ that made his professors feel sorry for him, the type of sketch only grasped by children and savages, those who know nothing of layouts and elevations, those who by gift of God do not even see perspective.

There was nothing thrilling before the Australian Wall; paid-for thrills, I mean. The inner surface of a cylinder 10 meters in diameter and 15 high was a frightening vertical track where, suspended in midair, horizontal and clinging to a motorcycle launched at top speed, Ciro Beckett launched the most captivating maneuvers, before the eyes avid for disaster of the common people, crowded on high around the edge of the scary and thundering pit. Something pure and prodigious, the acrobatic masterpiece.

At the top of the cylinder, on a white balcony, a noisy crowd smoked as they spat chewing gum and pumpkin seeds into the huge dark pit. When full to capacity, a small unseen door at the rear opened quickly and Ciro Beck emerged straddling a large lemon-colored machine with red-brown patching. His face sanguine and calm, he was wearing an immaculate iron gray lounge suit.  Alone, as if in the lion’s den, his hand requested silence, and he instructed people to extinguish their cigarettes. Then the silence was broken by the sudden explosive roar of the motorcycle. Hunched over, Ciro Beck brought it to life with a powerful and unceremonious forward thrust, as if wrestling with a bull’s horns.  With never previously seen precision, he traced a circle around the vertical track: just one, then he suddenly accelerated and the motorcycle, and with no warning, canted it away from the vertical, released as if by magic from the force of gravity.  Then horizontal, it climbed in fast spirals up the inner surface of the large cylinder, giving the unhuman impression of an airplane flying upside down. They gigantic pit magnified the scream of the engine, which became excruciating. Ciro Beck continued to circle at a crazy speed as he gained height, his face was calm, as if embalmed on the yellow and red-brown beast. It was insane. Ciro Beck seemed to hold his irascible machine in the air as though under a spell. The air became acrid and, at every passage, people were struck by a blast of smoke and a wallop of air. The light filtering through the yellow purple canopy turned faces a sickly blue.

Then came the final act of daring: the crowd stupefied by the noise, as if in a dream, saw Ciro Beck – invested by blue smoke from the exhaust and flashes of chrome – released the handlebars, raised his yellow palms (boar-skin gloves) high in the air and stretched them out as if in defiance.  Only his knees controlled the raging motorcycle that fell several times in vast precise and vertiginous elipses into the misty abyss, before reascending each time with sure impetus into the light, almost invoking freedom. A moment’s lapse and the screaming monster and its meticulous magician would have been flung from the track as if by a monstrous catapult, only to be smashed far away on the paving of the square.

Eventually, the white circle around the top of the track seemed to provide rails for the now-tamed machine as it revolved crazily and hypnotically a meter from the crowd leaning over the large pit.  Ciro Beck loosened his pincer knee grip, climbed slowly over the fuel tank and sat side saddle, his face now resembling that of an unscrupulous witch doctor, hands in his pockets and face turned first towards the pale sun and then to the bottom of the abyss.  He was indifferent to the screaming monster that carried him as he climbed slowly back toward the handlebars and sat there like the prophets on clouds and cathedral frescoes. Then to the stifled shouts of the crowd, with a sudden and laugh-like twist he was standing triumphantly on the saddle, his arms raised high and stretched out as if to invoke a supreme spell, and impassive Angel riding thunderously on the storm. Time to end and, seized by a sudden determination, Ciro Beck gripped the exhausted machine between his knees again and forced it round in the frenzy of a vertiginous revolution, almost as if precipitating, wounded, toward the bottom of the track where it landed with the engine off, as lightly as a seagull.

When that impeccable gray suit – so out of place – brought us back to the mundane world in everyday matters, we felt an undefined sense of malaise, as he we had when amidst all the commotion we spied the slender and graceful young female cashier perched on her high back chair viewing all that danger unmoved. Stunned for a moment, the dumbfounded crowd had no time to shout before Ciro Beck disappeared like a shadow through a small door, opened to a silent order, simply giving a sweeping wave and not the customary servile ‘voila’ gesture of the acrobat of old  (‘thank you for letting me risk my life for you’). The motorcycle lay dead in the middle of the track; they would come for it but no one cared about it now.

Ciro Beck did all these simple and terrible things. Style-perfect and ceremoniously, he executed all the street tricks of bullish suburban bikers. Suspended in midair he made the hair of Sydney’s sharp dressers stand on end, amazed the coy half-caste girls, and prompted the butchers to cry ‘stop it!’ –  the acme of true emotion. The crowd expected Cyro Beck to kill himself from one day to the next but, in five years, he never even spoiled the crease in his trousers, and made a fortune.

At first, Oberon’s creation looked like an imperious monument, tumbled from another planet onto Assumption Square, surrounded as it was by the decrepit Baroque constructions of Sydney’s early Jesuits. At its feet, the other side shows, carousels, and shooting galleries – so unattractive and unrefined Down Under – resembled abandoned encampments, rank and in ruin.  From afar everyone spied a conical canopy with harsh reds and yellows in radiating pattern, like a huge upturned skirt suspended in midair and fluttering in the breeze, almost alive. It too, like the crowd, looked down to the bottom of the cylinder below, but was ready to rise in a neapolitan sky, as light as a hot air balloon.

The narrating construction created for the delirium was animated from above by the crowd crammed into three rows around a circular balcony on high: white along the parapet and as shiny as black shoe polish below, it overhung the top of the large purple-red cylinder. Oberon had also created that feverish red, toiling for a week before Ciro Beck’s anxious eyes, he too shocked by the labored delivery of such a lethal red. Oberon pursued that very red, perhaps like Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’, that violent death threat of certain roses from his homeland, tinged at the tips with velvety black and stirring fear and curiosity both. There is nothing arcane in all this, he was familiar with the great power of color to create and move space, and govern sentiments, and he painted architecture and statues with specific colors; brash to the brainless and sophisticated both. So, with sure intuition, he painted the large cylinder that indigestible red, producing a vibrant, shiny, and rugose surface. Above it he traced in precise positions four bright trajectories in yellow which, close to the vitreous red, blinded like neon lights.

In front of the cylinder was a luminous frame painted in tragic magnesium white, not shiny; the entrance. It was like a frame that, after a previously happy life, had suddenly been struck by lightning, incinerated in that position for life and condemned by the architect to remain thus for all eternity. This is how the unschooled Oberon described the Wall to us, with effective images and an ambassador’s tongue.

Most annoying people only believe in an architect’s knowledge only when he can reel off the modules of the columns of the Temple of Ceres, and the ratio between the bottom and shoulders of any Venus.  Like Oberon and Ictinus, we shall never take the trouble to know these things, and say they are nonsense. But we, who know it is just such bull that gives Art a capital A, beg these cantankerous beings to cast an eye at the drawing, where they will see an honest image of the Australian Wall, Oberon’s first work: a fairground attraction.

If at all possible, they should look beyond those ‘indispensable’ proportions – which here too are faultless – and try to see architecture. In the left hand corner there is a pen drawing, one of Oberon’s renowned primitive drawings, which along with others helped us paint a picture of that attraction that our minds could grasp. Oberon came to us as a novice, learning to draw properly much later, as required by schools of architecture. He almost learned after producing his finest architecture. For a long time he was happily ignorant of Mongo’s method of projection, which is now in our blood from birth. He saw plans, elevations sections, and perspective as necessary and painful accomplishments. We shall talk of this suffering in due time; suffice for now to see that this vibrant drawing contains all Oberon’s construction with precision, and from it and the surviving notes in his notebook on measurement and colors, we effortlessly reconstructed and exactly illustrate the elevation of the Australian wall.

Being reconstructed faithfully and with no toadyism, we stood stupefied as if before the unexpected outcome of an alchemical process. We had previously only known the Australian Wall through Oberon’s flamboyant speech but now, aided by his tetragram, we had drawn it out of the realm of shadows, brought so strangely back to life by his measurements, powerlessly led by his hand from darkness to orderly light. Fortunately for our readers, we are not talking aesthetic criticism. We only ask many of the serious broad-based architects whether they could have produced such a purely beautiful, classical, and powerful work as Oberon. Let them dream their celestial visions while pushing boring boxes for banks, or interior designs for expensively kept women, with a modern fad – that of triangular mirrors. Let them say the theme lent itself and that it is basically a cylinder with a frame in front of it. We know their smug reasoning by heart: when a theme is presented hand in hand with a complete solution, then it seems the only one possible solution, clearly the logical one.  Those are obviously the proportions, and all effort disappears in the face of the ultimate balance. But Oberon’s notebooks can speak better than us. For the moment, we shall ask these consumptives of Art whether they have never thought of binding their constructions with such precise ratios, so ‘in tension’ as in this fairground attraction: whether they have ever thought that architecture might not be a splendid corpse with exactly the right proportions.  But a work that cries out for its raison d’etre, just as this modern and classical pavilion with its unique colors and proportions, cries out the shocked suspense awaiting us at the site of Ciro Beck’s very modern acrobatics and the Will of Oberon the architect.

You have to imagine this construction lit up by euphoric and harsh floodlights on a festive evening, the shouting crowd gathered before the white frame, the voice of the barker with his megaphone, the obsessive clanging of the gong, and serene Beck in his gray suit at the center of the white rectangle, a floodlight pointing straight at him. He straddles the irascible machine, enveloped in the smoke and din of an engine ‘revved up’ with abrupt bursts of throttle. No artifice could produce such a forceful effect without architecture: a solemn ritual would be missing its temple. The enthralled crowd stares at the extraordinary pavilion and, as if in a daze, all climb, without encountering obstacles, the light steps – lilac-colored like sweets – up the purple-red belly of the cylinder, and without quite knowing how, find themselves on high at balcony level. Only then and not before do they realize they must buy a ticket from the pretty girl wearing Nile green, perched on a lofty bench. Taking their (always wrong) change, they feel without knowing why that they are going to see something very exciting. This, we believe, is true architecture.

Fifty percent of the architecture of all time has had advertising intentions.    – Carlo Mollino, 1933