MARAMOTTI COLLECTION - the collection

The Place

The Old Building

The Max Mara Fashion House was founded in 1951, and the commission for the building at via Fratelli Cervi 66, designed to be its headquarters, was given to the architecture firm of Pastorini and Salvarani in 1957. On three occasions in the course of the next ten years it was also amplified by the Reggio Emilia Cooperative of Architects and Engineers. The design for the building was highly radical and broke new ground for its time, since it centered on taking maximum advantage of natural light and ventilation, and also sited all utilities outside the central structure, so as thus to create an extremely versatile ground-floor space.

In 2003, Max Mara moved to new headquarters on the outskirts of Reggio Emilia, having far outgrown its former home, and it was decided that the original building would house the collection of contemporary art acquired by the company’s founder, Achille Maramotti.

The New Building

The plan for the building’s transformation into an exhibition space was both open and respectful of its past. It preserved its crude simplicity and adhered to the logic of the original project, which saw it as a highly adaptable structure which could serve a number of purposes, and shift configuration as changing needs demanded.

The project for the conversion by the English architect Andrew Hapgood is typified by three new and salient interventions. The first and most essential intervention has modified the perception of the building within its urban context: the orientation of its main entrance has been shifted, as part of a general reassessment of the fundamentally industrial character of its architecture. The creation of a new line of sight running parallel to via Fratelli Cervi now furnishes the building with ample entrance spaces that open back through the east and west facades, and then lead the visitor forward into the gallery spaces. An element that finds articulation along a wall of the length of fourteen meters constitutes the central focal point of the ground-floor spaces, and all this floor’s activities are arranged around it: the reception hall, the spaces for temporary exhibitions, the library and the offices.

Two new volumes have also been created in the building’s interior, as conduits that filter natural light down to the ground floor. As well, a three-storey space has been built above the main entrance, and again at the center of the permanent collection; one returns to this space any number of times during the visit. This space, like another two-storey space for large-scale paintings, is lit by three linear skylights hidden above the primary structure in cast concrete. Sunlight is distributed by way of reflectors within their vertical shafts, thus allowing the building’s interior to remain in touch with the surrounding outside spaces and the changing qualities of their natural light.

The permanent collection is housed in the building’s two upper floors. Daylight floods the galleries through the building’s original glass facade, but the exact degree of sunlight and overall illumination are controlled by the solar roof, first installed in the 1970s, and now restructured. The landscape setting designed by Lucy Jenkins also adheres to the principles that guided the building’s renovation: its local plants and style of ornamentation reinforce the notion of the area’s recolonization as a post-industrial landscape.

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The Max Mara factory
The Fifties