RADICAL DESIGN p179

Friday, December 17, 2021 13:33

Design and industry: the Italian model between the 50s and 60s The relationship between
designers and industry is taking shape in Italy what can be defined as the Italian model.
Relationships with the network of Italian companies that produce means of transport, comma
appliances, technical objects such as Fiat, Olivetti, necchi ... In a few years, the Italian production
of white goods conquered first place in Europe and second in the world, while Olivetti obtained a
leading role in electromechanics. It was with the crisis of the 70s that the framework of Italian
industrial production changed and consequently also the collaboration with designers.
With the demand for modern furniture growing, entrepreneurs and designer architects come together
to create partnerships that in some cases will last a long time.
The ability of Italian companies to dialogue with designers is a specific feature of the Italian model:
which is why in the following 10 years designers from all over the world will be willing to collaborate
with Italian companies.
New materials make machining and industrialization possible: Italian designers demonstrate another
ability by reinventing furnishing typologies and morphologies.
Plastics allow a new generation of furniture and objects for the home and offices. The use of
chipboard to produce modular furniture. The lighting sector is also developing.
What emerges is an extraordinary ability of companies to self-promote themselves by affirming
design as a symbol of the new modernity.
An articulated activity of promotion, communication, advertising is therefore developed. In 1961 the
Salone del Mobile opened in Milan and this profoundly changed the relationship between companies
and retailers. A new role is affirmed for showrooms that promote their identity in the territories.
This is how the relationship between companies, designers, communication, distribution and the
market developed in Italy.

Premise pop the message is therefore to combine well in materials and achieve a potential well-
being. Pop culture officially enters the imagination of the common home and from it takes its
idols, and then returns its iconic examples to the world: Warhol, lichtenstein... that make possible
the profound cultural transformation that began after the Second World War The post-industrial
society is based on the provision of services and the new society of mass communication sees in
the middle -> Mac luhan: the medium is the message.
The both-and theory is affirmed, according to which there is an inclusive and democratic culture
capable of reaching the widest range of users.
The themes of nomadism, multifunctionality and obsolescence are recurrent on the side of research
design, which tries to arrive thanks to plastics at the diffusion of pop art, even in the market. These are
topics that will soon enter the world of design more generally, generating objects designed to be
moved from one environment to another and to be destroyed and replaced rather than repaired and
maintained. All cloaked in a graphic communication that looks at the world of cartoons, to be
understood by most and enjoyed on several levels

Italy and radical design

In Italy there is a profound separation between the design culture and that of consumers; The design
of everyday objects aims to bridge this gap. The affirmation of plastic materials introduce new
methods of production, proposing a project starting from the pop one that will make people choose
the path of design as an affirmation of a counterculture.
The driving forces behind this changed attitude towards the freight project are Florence and Turin. In
the Faculty of Architecture in Florence, a series of occupations by students began in the early 60s. The
Italian student movement carries out actions of revolt and denunciation against the political class
identified with industrial capitalism and overlaps with the protest of the working class.
In 1966 Florence experienced the tragedy of the flood that devastated the city's cultural heritage. The
apocalyptic scenario is of strong symbolic power: the monuments of the Renaissance are submerged
by a shapeless mass of mud that literally buries the glories of the past. An international solidarity
movement arrives in the city to save what can be saved from destruction. Some of the Florentine
designers seize the evocative power of these images to make a clean slate.
The mixture of contemporary reconstruction and burial of the past is powerful and enters the
consciousness of designers.
A few months later, the visionary proposals of many of them were born, starting from the continuous
monument of superstudio to the non-stop sites of archizooms.
A project emerges that sees in the furniture a way to imagine a world that, as the maximum expression
of rebellion, assumes the hypothesis of living without architecture. -> The ultimate goal of
architecture is the elimination of architecture itself, says Andrea Branzi, founder of archizoom. He
also says that design becomes the fundamental design tool to really change the quality of life and the
territory.
They began to use places not traditionally linked to architecture and design projects: from the small
jolly due gallery in Pistoia, where the first super architecture exhibition by archizoom and superstudio
would take place.
Among the most far-sighted experiments is that of Ugo la pietra, with Aldo Jakober and Paolo
Rizzatto, who in Milan designed a boutique disco called Bang Bang, where the relationship between
the place of sale and that of entertainment are closely connected. Elio Fiorucci, importer of product
ideas from London and New York, will base his great success on this, he will mix a playful pop
aesthetic, merchandise and vision, high and popular culture, place of sale and scene of entertainment.
In these projects, the extensive use of pop aesthetics deliberately borders on kitsch, as a symbolic
form of contamination between genres and a mixture of traditional and popular culture.

Some designers design furniture that finds in the alliance with young industrialists the possibility of
synthesizing their ideas in a new product idea. The result is furnishings that will mark history.
The common basis is the idea of a nomadic, multifunctional object, designed to be transported into a
transformable changing home. Fundamental to the affirmation of this living project is the alliance
with some industrialists, first of all Aurelio Zanotta, of the company of the same name, and Sergio
Camilli of Poltronova, who puts into production a series of projects by Ettore Sottsass. Among the
furnishings that have entered serial production we find the super wave of archizooms produced by
poltronova in 1966 which comes from the unique undulating cut of a comma coated polyurethane
bread that can be used as a bed, sofa or long descent.
In 1969 Depas, D'Urbino and Lomazzi transferred the use of inflatable plastic from utopian urban
proposals in a session:
- the bloW for zanotta, which identifies a young and dynamic design. The theme of the inflatable
will be among the most followed both in architecture and in radical design: the insufflated
plastic material, capable of passing from flat to volumetric, is an optimal vehicle for research on
nomadic, light, transportable and transformable furniture.
But the scepter of longevity of the product is held
- the bean bag of cats Paolini and Teodoro made of fabric or leather padded with polystyrene
balls. An object that starts from a function and no longer from a type: it is used to sit but does
not have an armchair that harnesses in a single posture. It is the body that imposes the shape of
a sack. It identifies a real way of approaching the project in a new way, so much so that we will
no longer talk about chairs and armchairs but about seats.
The concept of function replaces that of typology.
Some furnishings definitely embody the suggestions of pop culture:
- the Giò chair by de pas d'urbino and lomazzi, which glorifies a symbol of American popular
culture, namely the baseball glove of the champion Joe Dimaggio; It is a seat that mimics a
classic of bourgeois furniture The leather sofa The idea of working on the enlargement of a
small object is of pop derivation, as is the culture to which it refers.
- proton of the strum group, (which in those years worked on an interior theme such as that of the
disco with the project for the Piper in Turin intended as an experimental sociological space)
A seat that replicates in an openly anti-naturalistic and artificial version, through
a plastic foam the bucolic idea of the clod of an enlarged meadow on which to lie down to rest.

In these furnishings, materials that until then had been confined inside the structures or with the
function of padding to be covered are poured outside. All these examples are united by the leap in
scale, by the gigantism of proportions. Oldenburg Environmental art: they force a rethinking of the
relationship between the human body and things.
The sedentary culture of fixed furniture, divided into rooms that identify each function of living, is
replaced by a free space in which objects migrate and it is they who perform the practical function of
habitability. A demonstration of this revolution that privileges the role of furniture is the basis of the
exhibition Italy i: the New domestic landscape, inaugurated at the MoMA in New York in 1972 under
the curatorship of Emilio Ambasz. The Italian design of the previous decade is proposed to the world
public as the absolute avant-garde of a new sensibility of interior design.
There are three approaches that a bast uses to represent Italy:
1. the conformist, where one only has to perfect already accepted and pre-established social forms
2. The reformist Consumption is a tool for happiness and therefore to change design we must first
change society
3. the contestatory, the design to the function of transforming in social ways and customs and
therefore the object is oriented towards extreme flexibility and multiplicity for use
here we find the representatives of what Germano celant had just called radical design 1969.
Experimental groups of architects and designers offer you their visions in environments, urban
landscapes in which the distinction between disciplines is broken, as well as that between interior and
exterior, small and large scale.
Practical functions are thus flanked and sometimes surpassed by symbolic ones.

Influenced by pop art

Challenge to the system of mass production
Critique of functionalism
Many are useless objects, not very functional but the important thing was the connotation of the
furniture as a totem to be inserted in the house (they also had strange names)

 Archizoom 1966 1974

Works on urban visions -> visions of the city (such as No stop city), dystopian visions (negative)
SUPERWAVE
One of the first sofas without a conventional frame. In the name of a freer way of life encouraged by
its undulating surfaces, Superonda is destined to challenge the restriction of the middle class. Like all
objects designed by Archizoom, it aims to inspire creativity and imagination. The colored cardboard
prototype was exhibited at the Superarchitettura exhibition in Pistoia, a manifesto of Italian Radical
Design. Its modular character and lightness allow you to change its use to your liking; It can be a bed,
a sofa or a chaise longue.

Icon the superonda sofa, abolishes the idea of the need to sit in a certain way
They presuppose an assembly dictated by one's tastes

 superstudio's answer to the No stop city was the Movimento Continuo 1969

Another important explosion was the magazine CASABELLA, directed by Alessandro Mendini
The founding theme of inconsistency
The Global Tools 1973 group is formed: a collective founded on university collectives, with the
development of stimulating individual creativity... basic notions for the use of equipment, material
tools, etc. The body is also a fundamental element, to be used as a tool

 Riccardo Dalisi
It represents Naples, a marginalized city but with a very spontaneous popular and folkloristic culture
At. Mendini invited him to Casabella to show how the figure of the professor who took his
students with him to poor environments, was able to free creativity through his own hands and poor
materials were the only track that helped the recovery of delinquency Recovery of ideologies
through form -> educational workshops

 Franco Raggi
 Ettore sottsass

 BODY ART
Using one's body as if it were an object

 ALESSANDRO MENDINI
Person who most influenced radical design
Director of Casabella, then he created a magazine in modo and then became
part of Domus Anni 70, a designer who pilloried the concept of use, of
function.

Chair Up There -> He made the object become a monument, then he takes it into an alien situation
and finally becomes the protagonist of a performance until it destroys itself and returns to its original
form, that is, nothingness

- Self-portrait with a prisoner from Mauthausen, 1974

- Last trip suitcase

Work on the theme of scale

- Slide chair
- Straw chair

Object without function -> lamp without light

ITALY EXHIBITION. THE NEW DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE, MOMA 1972

It is said that Italy is the world's leading force in the field of product
Oanaromic on design trends, Italy is chosen because it represents a micro model
3 Approaches
1. Conformist: all those designers with innovative qualities pursued by new technologies and
materials but not in the redefinition of the use of the object
2. Reformist: new use of objects, insertion of ironic objects, revolutionizes the use of the object in
a form that is not so intrinsic to function
3. Protest: objects that introduce the multifunctional and that allow the freedom to live in the
interior space

Division of the exhibition into two parts

- 1 part 180 objects chosen according to the 3 criteria
Presented in container towers that refer to the theme of the shop window.
○ Conformists : Objects selected for their technical and formal significance BLOW
ARMCHAIR, de pas d'urbino, Lomazzi, 1967 (use of a new material) was created by dissecting a
dinghy and using the same material
-> lightness, transferability
-> packing is also studied, with a pump inside to inflate it -> can be used on occasion

MODEL UP 5 -> objects selected for sociocultural implication

Up series, gaetano pesce
Sell a totally deflated armchair, only in the home environment will it actually inflate my seat

MODULAR, kartell x Anna Castelli Ferreri

BOALUM, Artemis
TELEFONO GRILLO, Sapper and Zanuso 1965-67
The shape refers to a cricket, but is designed according to the features of the hand
Ergonomics and use of color

○ Objects selected for sociocultural involvement

JOE ARMCHAIR
The end user decides how to use it

PRATONE, strum group (cderetti, derossi, red)

A sort of object where we can relax

MEZZADRO, castiglioni
Seat with tractor seat
 ○ Objects selected because they propose a more flexible usage model or arrangement
Multifunctionality

BEAN BAG

COMMON GULL

TUBE CHAIR, joe colombo

SERPENTONE, artflex

- 2 part dedicated to installations in which he calls designers to design individual domestic spaces
(only Italian) but then installed at the MoMA - propose contemporary models not future

Fiberglass storage units by Sottssass

Household functions assigned to a single container
The cabinet absorbs the spatial function, what is important is the wiring

Total furnishing Unit, Joe Colombo

Edit the contents of the container

Gae Aulenti SEE LESSONEEEEEE