Marino Auriti dreamed of a structure that could do the impossible: contain and express the knowledge of the entire planet. He filed a design with the U.S. Patent Office in 1955 for “Il Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo,” or “The Encyclopedic Palace of the World,” describing it as a museum to present “all the works of man in whatever field, discoveries made and those which may follow.” It would honor human ingenuity in “everything from the wheel to the satellite” and hold laboratories and displays to further that spirit of creation. As inspiration, 126 bronze statues would adorn its encircling colonnades, depicting “writers, scientists, and artists past, present and future.”
Most spectacularly, Auriti spent three years building an eleven-foot-tall model of the Encyclopedic Palace at a 1:200 scale. He surrounded it with four columns and meticulously added 792 celluloid windows, balustrades crafted from cut hair combs, and functional doors across its 136 stories. It was constructed humbly from bits of metal, wood, and plastic in the chassis of an old car in his Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, garage, but he envisioned its cylindrical tower, crowned by a metal spire, soaring to 2,322 feet among the national monuments of Washington, D.C.
A retired auto-body mechanic who had immigrated to the United States from Italy in the 1930s, Auriti also crafted handmade frames, copied Old Master paintings, and built other architectural models, although none so ambitious as the Encyclopedic Palace. This project’s utopian attempt to secure and organize learning and knowledge was likely influenced by his firsthand experiences with the violent disruptions of the two world wars and the rise of fascism in Europe. He wanted to share his idea with the world and is known to have exhibited the model twice in his lifetime in a specially designed pyramidal case made of glass and metal. After he died in 1980, however, it was put in a storage locker.
Yet his family never gave up on finding a permanent place for the model to be preserved and appreciated by the public. After their tireless outreach to numerous institutions, the American Folk Art Museum finally acquired it in 2003. Its international star turn came in 2013 when it was selected as the centerpiece of the Venice Biennale.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
