Two or three years ago I ran into Alvaro Urbano while we were both visiting Casa Mollino in Turin. This apartment is said to have been conceived by Italian architect Carlo Mollino, who died in 1973, as a kind of tomb for his spirit to inhabit in the afterlife; its ambience is both morbid and mesmerizing. It was an appropriate place to meet: Urbano, trained as an architect, deals with the narratives and the dreamlike auras of mythical spaces of twentieth-century architecture in his sculptural installations and environments, orchestrated down to the last detail with theatrical flair. He finds