Michelangelo Antonioni Archive
The Michelangelo Antonioni Archive is part of the collections of the Gallerie d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of the Comune di Ferrara. After purchasing the director's personal archive from Michelangelo and Enrica Antonioni, the city administration set out to create a museum devoted entirely to the filmmaker.
In 2006 the Museum had to close for major maintenance and to bring the building up to code. At the same time, it was decided to bring the Antonioni Museum into the Palazzo Massari museum complex, which was scheduled for extensive restoration.
After the May 2012 earthquake, the structural reinforcement and redesign of the exhibition spaces became even more important. The work is still underway and, when the museum reopens, will offer visitors a brand-new route.
From now on, the new Massari will also tell the human and artistic story of Michelangelo Antonioni through the extraordinary documents that make up the collection.
A modular design
The site's complexity comes from the number of pages built around the Archive section, the true heart of the project. To solve this effectively we chose a modular design, with reusable blocks across pages depending on the content: shorter or longer texts, images with or without captions, all fully responsive. A clear example is the structure of the headers: there are three variants, depending on the importance of the section and the text or image it holds.
The Michelangelo Antonioni Archive
Built up over the long career of the Ferrara-born director, the collection holds not only documents of every kind closely tied to the various stages of creating and developing his artistic projects, but also books from his rich library, records, collections of photographs and postcards, posters, playbills, artworks (made by him) and personal belongings.
The Archive page introduces these fifteen subsections graphically or in text. Once inside, faceted navigation opening on the left leads to the most detailed single result. The other in-depth pages are also connected to the Archive, as curated, thematic collections of specific documents.
