Milan show revives the reputation of architect Angelo Mangiarotti

The Italian Fascists fetishised Rome, and the great monuments of the classical age. Postwar Italy needed a new idol. And it found it in the factory.

We might think of Europe’s great postwar industrial miracle in relation to Germany, but Italy’s transformation was arguably even more remarkable — nowhere more so than in Milan, where a particular culture of architecture, art, fashion, interiors and production created our modern idea of design.

Italian architects proved adept at navigating between industries. One in particular exemplified this seemingly effortless movement among buildings, art, products and even the designs of the factories in which they were made. Angelo Mangiarotti (1921-2012) is much less known outside Italy than some of his contemporaries but has long been due a reassessment, which has come in the shape of a fine show at Milan’s Triennale.

Models of buildings and engineering details sit in a landscape of things alongside maquettes of sculptures, clocks, vases, door handles and wine glasses, all of which underscore the Italian postwar fondness for form, bella figura transferred from the body to the object. Perhaps Mangiarotti has faded from memory because he did not adhere to one particular style but instead flitted between the minimal, extreme high-tech and sinuous organicism.

His best-known building is his most exquisite. The church of Mater Misericordiae (1956-57) in the Milan suburb of Baranzate is a translucent box of ethereal beauty. Looking like something avant-garde from 1980s Tokyo (this is a building that Tadao Ando has clearly studied), this incredible structure evokes an idea of a Japanese temple with its paper screens but caps it with heavy engineering in the form of concrete X-beams protruding just beneath the roof. X, a symbol embodied in the structure, is of course the code early Christians used among themselves to display their devotion to Christ. But overall this is the language of industry, something familiar to the workers in the area who would mostly have been employed in the local factories, here elevated to the sublime.

Mangiarotti lavished the same attention to detail on the apartment blocks he designed which, with their projecting bays and finessed facade details, look astonishingly contemporary. The fascinating Via Quadronno block (1956-62), for instance, with its irregular plan and floor-to-ceiling windows, is a remarkable building in which the structure seems to disappear.

His factories and stations are equally impressive, sometimes more so. The vaults and struts of his Porta Venezia Station in Milan, completed in 1997, blend an almost Roman attitude to structure with an embrace of high-tech engineering. For Ferrovie dello Stato, the national rail company, he used huge trusses to make the canopies, their structure an analogue of the gantries and steel constructions along the railway tracks.

If these buildings look very different from each other, it is fascinating to see them here, in the huge halls of the Trenniale, brought together as drawings and tied together through their medium.

Mangiarotti was particular about a special paper which he would get from the patisserie close to his apartment. A crema-custard yellow, thin and delicate, it has a lush quality and the fluid lines of his drawings are wonderful to see. Sketches for football stadiums, light fittings, office chairs and statues flatten out into a single visual medium, clearly from the same hand even if their expressive and material languages might be radically different.

The best thing here is the sense of surprise. From minimal buildings to extravagant tableware, Mangiarotti embraced the postwar miracle with gusto, delighting in manufacture, in the possibilities of design. Just look at the glass structure of his Giogali lamp. Conceived as a chainmail screen of individual glass hooks, it is a thing of seductive 1960s beauty, a gleaming architectural parallel to the fashion designs of Paco Rabanne, reimagining lighting as architecture, illumination as a screen.

Mangiarotti revelled in the idea and practice of production and mass manufacture; everything he did was designed with making in mind. He embodied the fascinating confluence of design, expression, craft and industry which made this period in Italy so fruitful and so rich in inspiration and renewal.

But determinedly apolitical, shy, working often alone and reluctant to push his own legend, Mangiarotti has been undeservedly squeezed out of the crowded canon of postwar architecture and design in favour of more flamboyant figures like Ettore Sottsass or more political designers like Enzo Mari. This show, in part designed by a great admirer of his, Renzo Piano, whose own work clearly bears the traces of his influence, begins to redress his absence.

To April 23, triennale.org