Lercaro Museum
Bologna, Italy
Project by: NuovoStudio

NUOVOSTUDIO DESIGNED THE GALLERIA LERCARO IN BOLOGNA. NuovoStudio of Ravenna received the commission to upgrade the large headquarters of the "Galleria Raccolta Lerarco" in Bologna. The three young professionals - Giancarlo Bonini, Francesco Muti and Emilio Rambelli - had the challenging task of completely rethinking the 8,000 square meters of the 1950's building located in the historic center of Bologna. The difficulty was that of valorizing not only the building, but the roughly 1600 artworks comprising the Lercaro collection. The basic criterion the architects followed was suggested by the client whose main need was to achieve the greatest possible versatility in terms of lighting effects and therefore maximum ductility in using the systems. The designers focused their efforts on a system that guarantees a broad spectrum of lighting scenarios, from standard diffused light to almost total darkness with just one or two light points. From the stylistic standpoint the chosen road apparently sacrifices design to create an invisible lighting system. But the key word is apparently because much depends on the meaning we want to give to the concept of design: what does not appear to the observer has no lines, or forms or design; but if design applied to lighting is taken in the extreme sense of a quest for the pure expression of light, well, then we can indeed say that Galleria Lercaro has attained excellence. The basic module used for the project consisted of a plasterboard covered metal channel, at ceiling height that houses a hidden lighting fixture that was specifically designed by Targetti. Nuovostudio asked Targetti to modify a standard production item by eliminating the aluminum profiles and everything else that would deviate from the principle of maximum essentiality - an essentiality that also applies to color, and does away with chromatics in favor of absolute white. The rigor extends to the museum's rooms where, while maintaining faith with the concept of light as pure performance, the designers opted for basic, yet visible fixtures. In this case the need was for focused rather than overall, diffused light. They chose a totally clean look, white prisms that "protrude" from the ceiling like tiny stalactites arranged in orderly rows. For some of the rooms where the ceilings are decidedly lower, the solution was to reduce the length of the fixtures' arms to maintain harmony among the proportions. THE LERCARO COLLECTION The New headquarters of the "Raccolta Lercaro", a prestigious collection of modern and contemporary art of the Fondazione Cardinale Giacomo Lercaro were opened in May 2003. Established in 1971, the collection today comprises about 1600 works selected for their quality and the reputations of their respective authors. Another specific feature of the "Raccolta Lercaro" is the attention dedicated to sculpture, and bronzes in particular. In fact, it is one of the richest Italian collections of sculptures with twenty-three pieces by Giacomo Manzù, nine by Marino Marini, ten by Arturo Marini and works by Vincenzo Vela, Medardo Rosso, Giorgio De Chirico, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro. The list of Italian sculptors would actually be much longer, and to this we must add the foreign artists whose works are part of the collection from Auguste Rodin, to Emmanuel Frémiet, from Ernst Barlach to Alberto Giacometti and Max Ernst, from Henry Moore to Sebastian Matta to Jean-Michel Folon. Nor is there any lack of original paintings and graphics, with pieces by Giacomo Balla, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis, Mino