In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Ponder with him on the garden gnome, the awkward yet ever-present Italian domestic feature
Carlo Ratti on the garden gnome
The garden gnome is the only Italian domestic object that inspires embarrassment. No one bats an eyelid anymore at a lace doily, a ceramic umbrella stand, a dinner service decorated with lemons, or even a pair of ‘pattine’, those little slippers for polishing the floor. But the gnome? It still causes a certain discomfort. Those who own one keep it secret, with the discretion normally reserved for private vices.
Imagine an ordinary garden centre somewhere in the Italian provinces, where a gnome with a white beard and red hat costs around ten euros and sits among the geraniums and the irrigation hose. The intellectual elites have condemned it for decades. Sales have not suffered; if anything, they seem to keep growing.
Its genealogy is nobler than one might think. Its ideal ancestors are the Roman Lares agrestes, protective spirits of the fields that patrician families placed on their estates, tucked between one hedge and another. The modern version, meanwhile, was born in Thuringia at the end of the nineteenth century, when manufacturers such as Griebel and Heissner transformed the terracotta gnome into a mass-produced object. It was also around this time that the term kitsch, meaning tawdry or trashy, was coined. The object and the concept were born together.
In 2000, Philippe Starck designed Attila, Napoleon and Saint-Esprit for Kartell in painted technopolymer, lifting the form from kitsch to camp. Elio Fiorucci created Nano for Riva 1920, carved from a single block of cedar wood. More recently, designer Pellegrino Cucciniello created Nino for Plato Design, a brutalist, low-poly concrete gnome, handmade in Italy and respectable enough to enter the living room. The ten-euro terracotta gnome, naturally, continues to outsell all of them put together.
One could say that the gnome is the oldest and most rudimentary interface between house and garden. Before home automation, before irrigation sensors, before CCTV cameras, the gnome stood there, guarding the threshold between domestic and natural space. Its presence declares: this is where the house ends and the wild begins. In an age defined by sensor-laden spaces and greenhouses governed by artificial intelligence, the gnome remains the first, clumsy and touching attempt to populate the boundary between architecture and nature.
When people ask me about the ‘poly home’ – the polyamorous, multispecies house that accommodates plants, animals, robots and humans – I often think of the garden gnome. The gnome represents the primordial impulse to place a non-human presence within domestic space. An impulse that today manifests itself in autonomous Roombas and humanoid robots, but that in the nineteenth century took the form of a little terracotta man in a red cap.
It is a sentinel on a ten-euro salary, with 150 years of uninterrupted service. The most insulted and most widely purchased object in the history of Italian design. And, in this sweltering summer, the only inhabitant of the garden that never complains about the heat.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.