Paola the Populist

Apart from scouting objects for the museum's collection, Antonelli curates MoMA special exhibits, distilling the impressions and discoveries she amasses over a year's worth of travel, reading, Web surfing, shopping, conferences, and meetings with designers worldwide. In a typical year, she logs eight serious trips, not counting jaunts within the United States. Whenever possible, she likes to wander aimlessly through the grittier areas of whatever city she's in. "My idea of a great vacation," she says, "is to be in a city that I don't know, on a bus, with a window seat."

Antonelli has a knack for bottling the zeitgeist. "My job is to give a simultaneous portrait, filtered and synthesized, of how important design is, and what it's doing today that's so amazing and deserves to be seen and understood." In 2005, she mounted a show, conceived before September 11, called "Safe: Design Takes on Risk." It assembled 300 products and prototypes meant to protect human beings against perceived current dangers. (The Economist called it a perfect evocation of "the spirit of its time and place.") Her next exhibition, "Design and the Elastic Mind," will open in February and explore design's response to the dramatic changes in scale that people must navigate every day, from the view of an entire city on Google Earth to a street map on our mobile phone, from intimate, one-on-one conversations to the vast reach of social networks. The exhibition, she says, will include virtual things, like interfaces, and real things, like chairs, that deal with this constant, jarring shift in perspective.

Antonelli never planned to wind up in a museum. As a child, her ambitions were more cosmic. Born in Milan in 1963, she grew up wanting to be an astronaut. At age 9, she wrote of her plans to NASA, which responded with a letter telling her to study science and to take good care of her teeth. At 12, she got her first cavity and figured her space career was over. As a teen, she worked after school in the PR office at Armani, then studied economics at the university. After two years, she switched to architecture at Milan Polytechnic. When she tried to establish her own practice, she says, "I was a disaster. Architects have to be single- minded, completely convinced of their calling. I need to get things done faster, so writing and curating was better for me."

There's this view that the commercial side is dirty, Antonelli says. The commercial aspect of objects is something beautiful.

She joined the Italian architecture magazine Domus, then taught design for three and a half years at UCLA. Tiring, finally, of the trek between Los Angeles and Milan, she opened a copy of I.D. magazine and saw an ad for the position of associate curator, specializing in architecture and design, at MoMA. She wrangled an interview with then-curator Terry Riley at Les Deux Magots in Paris, and landed the job--her first at a museum.

The learning curve was steep. "I had never worked in a conventional office. I was completely green at politics," she says. But all that faded after The New York Times gave her 1995 "Mutant Materials" show a warm review.

Now, Antonelli says, she wants to use her influence to promote design globally. Her hope, she says, is that strong examples should be as common here in her adopted country as they are in Italy, where you find them at any corner store. "People in the United States should understand that beauty does not cost more than ugliness," she insists. "Beauty is everybody's right."

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