Inventario 20

The twentieth volume of Inventario celebrates a major milestone in an independent publishing journey that began in 2010 to explore the culture of projects with absolute freedom and analytical rigor. Moving across industrial design, visual arts, architecture, photography, and graphic design, Inventario continues to organize the flow of creativity through its characteristic thematic sections.

In this special issue, the cover—as always, the opening article—is dedicated to the Hourglass: an ancient device and silent machine that measures and stages time through a gravitational fall that is at once a promise, a theater of becoming, and a new beginning.

Marta Sironi writes an encyclopedic Inventario entry on Authors about Giancarlo Iliprandi, a transdisciplinary master and leading figure in Italian graphic design, retracing sixty years of work spanning painting, set design, photography, design, exhibitions, art direction, and civic engagement. Beppe Finessi analyzes five masterpieces of modern architecture that remain on paper. Matteo Pirola retraces the history of GERMANIA, Hans Haacke's courageous intervention at the 1993 Venice Biennale, with the shattering of the floor of the German Pavilion to evoke the tragedies of the Nazi era. Marlene Onali analyzes the Peephole in an exploration of the hole and the slit as optical instruments, perceptual boundaries, and triggers of voyeurism through art, architecture, and exhibition design, while Mario Piazza investigates the posters and the geometry of the color-lines of Japanese graphic designer Kazunari Hattori. Anna Castelli comments on Francesco Faccin's Pedestals research, which transformed the display support into a critical device and a mediator of meaning. Valerio Morgante, for the Bagatelle section, organizes an extensive and erudite survey of the primordial theme of Earth through installations and architectures. Manolo De Giorgi launches a new section dedicated to interiors, addressing the theme of Half-levels in some designer houses. Finally, Roberta Valtorta sketches a critical biography of Luigi Ghirri, and Martina Sanzarello illustrates the ironic and surprising Normal Wonders of Sarah Illenberger.