Carla De Benedetti's Architectural Photography Showcased at Milan Design Week 2026

Carla De Benedetti, Italy's first female architectural photographer, is the subject of a dedicated exhibition during Milan Design Week 2026. Her work, emerging in the 1960s, captured Milan's urban and interior transformations led by architects like Gae Aulenti, Joe Colombo, Ettore Sottsass, Vittoriano Viganò, and Nanda Vigo. De Benedetti, trained at the Politecnico di Milano and Zurich's Kunstgewerbeschule, brought a technical, spatial literacy honed under Ernesto Nathan Rogers. She documented bourgeois apartments using a Linhof camera, tungsten lamps, and colored films, producing only three to four shots daily. Her perspective often elevated to two meters or lowered to the floor, employing objects to create depth through open doors. Young women, typically seated with backs turned, were her rare human subjects. Publications Abitare and Casa Vogue competed for her images, which defined a vibrant era in Milanese culture. From the 1970s, she also conducted ethnic research in Africa for UNESCO's Silk Roads Project. Her archive of nearly 70,000 photographs is now housed at Milan's CASVA archive, curated by her last assistant Alessandro Morelli. The exhibition features large projections of her interiors, original documentation, magazines, and her Linhof camera. It runs concurrently with the Salone del Mobile, allowing visitors to immerse in her architectural visions.