NEW YORK CITY - October

photograph courtesy Roubini Rugs

Thursday. The Fornasetti Rug Collection by Roubini Rugs. A Cocktail party was held at the New York Design Center to launch The Fornasetti Rug Collection by Roubini Rugs. Piero Fornasetti was a Milan painter, a sculptor, an interior decorator, an engraver of art books, a creator of more than eleven thousand items. The lesson deriving from his oeuvre is the rigor with a strong imagination and an elegant and mystical sense of humor. Piero applied his decorative vocabulary to an astonishing array of commonly found objects to which Roubini has added a line of magnificent rugs. The rugs are hand knotted in wool and silk and available in standard as well as custom sizes. Shown above the Serpente (snake) rug.

The son. Fornasetti’s son Barnaba, is perpetuating the workshop tradition, continuing the production and reviving the most popular pieces, creating new ones, renewing hand crafted production. Barnaba Fornasetti is standing in front of the Mano (hand) rug and is wearing a Fornasetti waistcoat.

Seen at the Fornasetti Rug Collection party. Native New Yorker, Andrew Alpern is an architectural historian, an architect and an attorney. He has been a Fornasetti fan for at least thirty years. His latest book The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter was published by Acanthus Press. He is wearing a Fornasetti tie and a waistcoat called Architetto (architect) which he will be donating together with his collection of architectural drawing instruments, assembled over the past forty years, to the Avery Architectural library at Columbia University. Note that no other architectural library in the world has any architectural clothing in its collection. They will be producing a catalogue and there will be a permanent exhibition of the three hundred pieces that date from 1698 to 1950/60s. Alpern is photographed in front of the Viso (face with open eyes) rug.