Giacomo Balla #4

Casa Balla, Via Oslavia 39B, Roma.

"Casa Balla, in Rome, was the home of the Futurist painter, sculptor and set designer Giacomo Balla for thirty years.

If, as Victor Hugo wrote, “From the shell on can guess the mollusc, from the house one can guess the inhabitant”, then this apartment on the fourth floor of Oslavia 39B, in the Prati quarter – where the Torino-born artist lived from 1929 to 1958, the year of his death, with his daughters Luce and Elica –, can certainly tell us the story of its out-of-the-ordinary owner.
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In via Oslavia, Balla and his two daughters reutilized scraps of various materials to make flowers, put together light shades, screens and coat hangers, create tapestries and parchments, and sew Futurist clothes. They did ceramics, colored the walls, and decorated frames, using instruments that today are said to still lie in there, on a table, between some easels and old chairs.

Part of Balla’s creative equipment, indeed, is said to be still in those rooms, lit by their spectacular explosion of color.
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(bron: Italian Ways)






Casa Balla (model).

"....
The House of Giacomo Balla in Rome is a home-study which was designed at the time of his transfer in 1929 in Via Oslavia.

The color is the main element, because it enhances the dynamism and movement of the lines of the murals that decorate some rooms of the house, as the long corridor or the Studiolo Rosso. The painting is never interrupted, it involves the walls, the furniture and accessories such as lampshades or window glasses. The wallpaper on the walls was covered by the existing decoration, as was the case for the electrical wires and water pipes.

The Studiolo Rosso was conceived as a whole, from the walls to the ceiling where it repeats the same abstract motif, linked to the idea of speed, in the three basic tones of yellow, green and blue on a red background.
...."
(bron: Atlas of Interiors)