Francesco Fiammenghi
A Question of Practice: Carlo Mollino and Anthropotechnics

Anthropotechnics is a cardinal concept in the work of the philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk (b.1947). Although emerging unsystematically throughout Sloterdijk’s oeuvre, among his last works, we find a new field of study surfacing from the concept. Namely, a new anthropological science concerned with techniques through which human beings – via forms of life shaped by practices of self-discipline, exercises, habits, and training – redesign themselves and their environment accordingly. This field of study has a dual focus: an analysis of historical, sociocultural currents that determined practising lives and, concomitantly, exemplary cases of individual practices.

Among such individual practices, this study places the polymathic practice of the architect Carlo Mollino (1905-1973) as an exponent of anthropotechnics. Mollino’s diverse range of personal proficiencies – aerobatic pilot, academic, ski master, furniture designer, car racer, patent inventor, photographer, novelist, artist, theoretician – are often the objects of various mystifying interpretations, from self-representation to the portrayal of a lone multi-talented individual. In contrast, this study argues that Mollino’s polymathic practice stems from self-discipline exercises: a work on oneself intertwined with the cultural forces of his time.

By re-evaluating and applying Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics to architecture’s historical and theoretical domains, this study reframes the notion of self-design, enriching its evolving field of study. In so doing, it enacts a dual methodological approach in positioning Mollino in Sloterdijk’s field of anthropotechnics. Firstly, it shed new light on the exercises and efforts that shaped Mollino’s practising life. Secondly, it unveils the emergence of his exercises within the context of the late 19th to the 20th century, a transformative era characterised by the resurgence of practice and athleticism as a cultural, paradigmatic, and still-in-place symptom of modernity.