FABRICATION LABORATORY
Environments and Counter Environments. «Italy: The New Domestic Landscape», MoMA 1972
Proposals for environments by Rosselli, Aulenti and Sottsass © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
The celebrated 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art embodied a careful, analytical approach to categorization. As though informed by its own systems design logic, the exhibition encountered the dynamic and complexly political Italian design context of the early seventies, which it examined and organized into a matrix of categories, differences and distinctions. A first order of distinction separated Objects - reformist, conformist or contestatory - from Environments, themselves divided among design as postulation, design as commentary and counterdesign as postulation. In a cunning reversal, the Objects section was installed in the comparatively natural environment of the sculpture garden while the Environments were placed within the more conventionally institutional space of the museum galleries. This internalizing maneuver implied that the exhibition would stage an assessment of not only these specific environments but also of “environment” as an architectural term or strategy. By 1972 “environment” had already circulated through architecture and design from across a range of disciplines and through diverse filiations, from the environmental design movement and its association with the social and behavioral sciences, to biology, cybernetics and the defense industries, through to a more current notion of environment as linked to questions of ecology. While discriminating among the various attitudes, politics and strategies of the participants, the exhibition also tested the viability of the category itself, and at the same time considered the potential survival or disappearance of architecture, away from its objecthood
and into an environment of perceptual relations, behavioral configurations, and “domestic rituals”. To demonstrate their environments’ alterability the designers were asked to provide a film component. Several of the architects instead chose other media approaches, while Enzo Mari refused the installation and submitted only a text for the catalogue. Implicit in the responses was recognition that the conjunction of environment and media, especially within the intensely scrutinized location of the museum, would have the capacity to generate what Ugo La Pietra was to call “unbalancing systems”. Beyond illustrating the performance of the environments, the films and other media projects more carefully registered the design positions of the architects, especially as calibrated in relation to a recent history of experimental multimedia work and expanded media practices. The current exhibition brings together for the first time since 1972 the entire set of films produced for the original exhibition, many of which survive only on the 8 mm cartridges onto which they were transferred for the 1972 exhibition. The related design documents show a range of attitudes toward the conception and theoretical imperatives of the environments themselves, and in this respect the current exhibition encounters again media and environments and their potential for thinking anew the boundaries of architecture, domestic spaces, their conditions and territories.
Peter Lang , Luca Molinari , Mark Wasiuta
Detail of Superstudio installation © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Environment by Ugo La Pietra © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Curator, Counter-Curator. Curatorial Issues in Italy: the New Domestic Landscape. Peter Lang :
What is interesting about this exhibition, “Environments Counter Environments,” is that it came together like a puzzle. When the idea for the show started to circulate between the three of us in 2006, the impetus for the exhibition was the discovery of the eight missing films that were part of the original 1972 show at the MoMA, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” This implied from the start a new kind of archaeology, a kind of “media” archaeology, where we had to begin to dig around to discover from where these films —and video transfers (Mario Bellini) — originated. Since we were working primarily with designers and architects, and not with professional video artists and filmmakers, the “material” sources were to be found in their studios and public archives. For me, this presented some very interesting questions, very primary if you think about it, about the relationship between standard architectural means of representation and conceptual means of representation, and how these could link to the creation of motion-based narratives. Here was a way of communicating design and architecture not through “renderings” but through stories, sensations, emotions. Luca Molinari: On the question of new media in Italy Peter is correct. In the Italian architectural scene there were few precedents. Those that can be found are primarily didactic cinematographic works produced by architects like Piero Bottoni and Giancarlo De Carlo for MilanTriennale exhibitions in the years between the Thirties and the Fifties. As their function was uniquely didactic they didn’t pose the problem of cinema as a new medium of communications with “autonomous” content. Only around the early Seventies do we begin to see different productions, from a film
produced and directed by Aldo Rossi up to the more clamorous productions for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. The research for this material has surely opened an innovative methodological front with respect to the history of contemporary Italian architecture. It has revealed an experimental side that subsequently saw little further development. Mark Wasiuta : I think we all agree that the films are among the most compelling documents produced for the exhibition. From a curatorial perspective they deliver the most interesting problem within both the context of Italian design in the 1970s and the context of MoMA. Nonetheless, I want to emphasize that they were not screened as films, but were installed on monitors within the environments designed by the architects. The films were part of the environmental ensembles and elements in the installations. An implication of their original setting is that the films can be read in relation to multimedia installations and other media projects, such as the intermedia experiments that had been under way in the United States and Europe through the late 1960s and 1970s, among architecture groups and artists. I’m thinking of Walter Pichler’s TV Helmet, or Archigram’s proposals for multi-screen projections, even if the relatively simple monitor installation at MoMA was only a sign of the possibilities of these media environments and not their most exuberant expression. The inclusion of the monitors in the environments recognized that the New Domestic Landscape had to be considered within the emerging telecommunications context through which domesticity was being reformulated, or had been already reformulated by 1972. I agree that the media archaeology that Peter mentions or the other methodology
that Luca cites have to confront the basic status of the films, their historical oddity, their particular innovations, their challenge to design and their inflection of the architectural projects. Yet I think we also need to consider the encounter between the films and the other media projects in the 1972 show. Some of the most sophisticated reflections on domestic landscape as a space of media transmissions and receptions did not use films: Ugo La Pietra’s and Archizoom’s projects, for example. The films are so interesting because they reveal possibilities for new strategies of description, animation and demonstration, and also their limits. PL: Mark’s point about the role of the media as it encroaches on the domestic context, or landscape, to use Ambasz’s original term, is a critical aspect of this exhibition. Another angle to consider is the degree of Italian experimentation taking place in the early sixties in cinema, and especially in genres not typically associated with Italian production, like science fiction. Here you see directors like Mario Bava introduce some very innovative and sophisticated strategies to get the most out of their low budgets. In La Morte Viene dallo Spazio (The Day the Sky Exploded), co-directed by Bava in 1958, the basic premise is about an atomic rocket sent to the moon that went off course and caused a deadly meteorite shower to fall on the Earth. The film’s Cold War twist was its ironic ending where all the world’s nations shoot their nuclear bombs into outer space. Bava, by cutting short his space rocket scenes, instead invested his best special effects in creating wonderfully hallucinogenic images of the meteorites and panicked earthlings. Bava would go on to direct in 1965 Terrore nello
spazio (Planet of the Vampires), the film that inspired Ridley Scott’s Alien, again extremely innovative in introducing very stylized special effects, costumes, rocketship interiors, much more gloomy than what was coming out of Hollywood at that time. The point is that the Italians in the early sixties were constantly compensating for this inferiority complex they had with America, and the results were consistently outstanding. You could argue that Italian designers were also consciously outdoing what they perceived were practices originating in the United States. I’m thinking of the Eames’ films, for example. LM: Yes, I think that the example of the Eames would be a good fit, even if their work was better known for the interiors published in Domus. Though the great work of Italian cinema was going in other directions we can’t undervalue the role of Michelangelo Antonioni - an architect by training - in the development of innovative techniques of montage and narration focused on new metropolitan realities. Luchino Visconti and Rossellini, as early as the Forties, were compiling diverse imagery of an urban landscape undergoing profound transformation, documenting the metamorphosis of the Italian landscape. Later, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini used cinema experiments to diagnose the post war period and the ensuing economic boom. MW: I like the idea of reading the New Domestic Landscape as caught between the realism of Italian film and cinematic fantasies of the future. For the American audience the environments evoked more science fiction than domestic realism, I would wager. Clearly the show was intended as a fiction for an alternate future, one in which new types
of behaviours and social relations would emerge, and one in which the relatively tame modular sofa would appear as harbinger of unsettled domestic arrangements. That the films would deliver evidence of new domestic fictions and new domestic behaviours is partially what makes them so pivotal within the logic of the exhibition. The different formulations of a fiction of behaviour is also what makes comparison among the films critical. As just one example, I would mention the clever detourning of this question by Mario Bellini in his video, Something to Believe In. Bellini’s project enters the confluence of television and automobile environments of America in the 1970s, intelligently switching the question of contexts, behaviours and environments back onto those of the USA of the period. The project is also an intelligent application of emerging video technology and its possibility for combining image fragments and for forming adjacencies, and accidental elisions through overdubbing and playback. PL: Videos like Bellini’s are all the more surprising precisely because this kind of experimentation was normally outside the domain of professional practice. It would seem to me that the world of architecture and experimental film was very limited indeed, back then. There were several cases when the architect/designers participating in the MoMA exhibition had already attempted making films, and a few would continue to develop projects in film and video afterwards (Ugo La Pietra, for example, had started filming around Milan in the early seventies but decided not to enter a film for the New York show). But if you examine how this medium works, it’s apparent that it requires a set of compe-
tencies that were not then nor are now typically identified with architectural and design practice. For example, film requires some kind of thing to happen, primitive or otherwise, some kind of idea, to engage the viewer. Architects, more often than not, tend to see the object as a static condition. The digital walk-through animations that became popular in the mid eighties in architecture schools were extremely primitive exercises, limited primarily to moving along edges and voids within some larger organizational grid that appeared more like an effervescent algorithm. But at the beginning of the seventies, these architects and designers attempted to engage with something much more conceptually driven and ideologically substantive. Gae Aulenti’s emotionally cued, almost myopic study of a young woman living within her “Elements” evoked a sense of the real world, complex, irritating and sometimes poetic, digressions that totally transcended the mundane experience of the Elements as objects in themselves. This is what I would like to express that is essentially different from how architects would “objectively” attempt to describe space. It’s simply not the same thing. LM: I think that the authors who participated in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape have used video as a political instrument for the “new generation.” The attempt was to affirm more radical content than architecture and design would historically allow; it deals with research on new limits and tools with which to describe a new social and political reality in profound mutation. MW: I would argue that the films were positioned in order to challenge the conventions of architecture and design’s
institutional identities in the USA, and at MoMA, as much as in Italy or elsewhere. But let’s not forget that our exhibition is the first time the films have been shown together since 1972. This seems to imply that any radical potential they may have had in America, or for Italy and within the Italian design scene, was arrested, subverted or denied. I would claim that an important aspect of Environments and Counter Environments is to allow this latent radical potential to re-emerge, to reveal trajectories of practice and experimentation that may have been closed, even as we attempt to interrogate the assumptions and techniques themselves.
View of the installation in the MoMA courtyard © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Design as Postulation
Gae Aulenti
Environment, axonometric projection, 1972 © Gae Aulenti
Three elements Patrons:
ANIC-Lanerossi, Kartell Kartell with Zanotta
Producers:
The environment designed by Gae Aulenti reflects her position within Italian architectural culture at the end of the sixties. A former member of the editorial staff of Casabellacontinuità (1954-1962) under the direction of Ernesto Nathan Rogers and vice president of the ADI industrial design association, in 1972 Aulenti was one of the most promising emerging Italian designers, exploring different yet connected fields, working in industrial design (with Zanotta, Artemide, Poltronova, Knoll, Fontana Arte and others), interior design, exhibitions and theatre sets. With a position distinct from her Italian radical design contemporaries, her environment — three geometrically and functionally different red fibreglass elements set on a black plinth – nonetheless explored possibilities of architectural transformation and extreme flexibility. Her system of three elements could be arranged to form a variety of spatial experiences and modes of domestic organization. Seats, beds, storage spaces, other functions and a multiplicity of uses would emerge as the composition shifted. At the same time the vibrant angular landscape was also conceived as a field of pure symbolic forms that carried inherent values and “precise” signification. “Architecture is a concrete space, a positive thing that has as its substance the city, in which both private and collective factors join to transform nature through the exercise of reason and memory.”
Design as Postulation
Ettore Sottsass Jr.
Collage on cardboard, 1972 © CSAC, Università di Parma. Sezione Progetto
Untitled Patrons:
ANIC-Lanerossi, Kartell, Boffi, Ideal-Standard Kartell, Boffi, Ideal Standard
Producers:
The environment produced by Ettore Sottsass Jr. was composed from a set of identical plastic modules fitted to specific domestic functions (kitchen stove, book storage, water closet, audio amplifiers, etc). These cabinet-sized modules, mounted on wheels, could be arranged and rearranged in any number of configurations. Sottsass’ intention was to destabilize and decompose the conventional arrangements of domesticity by inciting entirely new patterns of spatial distribution and social relationships. For Sottsass, this was the direction towards a new de-signified counter-aesthetic: “The form is not cute at all. It is a kind of orgy of the use of plastic, regarded as a material that allows an almost complete process of deconditioning from the interminable chain of psycho-erotic self-indulgences about ‘possession’.” The infinite number of modular compositions, strung together or let loose in random patterns, would support, according to Sottsass, an unrestrained lifestyle, one that could re-dimension the scale of domesticity. “...(We) must be able to envisage a society or groups of people, not inclined to barricade themselves within great walled fortresses: people who don’t wish to hide, people who don’t feel the need, or perhaps even the unavoidable necessity, to demonstrate continually their imagined status, not to live in houses that are nothing other than cemeteries containing the tombs of their memories.”
Design as Postulation
Joe Colombo (In collaboration with Ignazia Favata)
Total Furnishing Unit, 1972 Kitchen axonometric. Ink on paper. © Studio Joe Colombo. Courtesy of Ignazia Favata
Total Furnishing Unit Patrons:
ANIC-Lanerossi, Elco-FIARM, Boffi, Ideal-Standard Elco-FIARM, Boffi, Ideal-Standard with the assistance Sormani
Producers:
Total Furnishing Unit is the last project designed by Joe Colombo before his death in July 1971. Colombo had by then achieved a degree of celebrity and was among the bestknown Italian designers. Even prior to the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition works by Colombo were already in the MoMA design collection, and as early as 1966 Design Research Int’l had put on a retrospective of his design in New York and San Francisco. Colombo fundamentally believed that the design of domestic spaces, objects and furniture was meant to be adaptable. Seeking to create minimal interventions that could be removed at will, mobility for Colombo meant that no piece of the habitat should be fixed in place and that all elements should be free to float in and out of one’s personal sphere of manual contact. The environment created by Colombo was conceived as a compact unit that could be completely transformed in relation to the different and variable needs of the inhabitants. “If we accept the idea that homogeneity is the basic premise underlying our designs, then the methodology that has determined them may be explained according to the following relationships: the relation between the city and the dwelling unit the relation between green spaces and the dwelling unit the relation between man and the dwelling unit ([…] The space within the unit should be dynamic: that is, it should be in a continual state of transformation, so that a cubic space smaller than the conventional norm can nevertheless be exploited to the maximum, with a maximum economy in its interior arrangement.”
Design as Postulation
Alberto Rosselli (In collaboration with Isae Hosoe)
A L B ERTO ROSSE L L I . CASA M O B I L E . P ENARE L L O E M AT I TA SU CARTA © CSAC UN I V ERS I T À DE G L I STUD I D I PAR M A . SE Z I ONE P RO G ETTO
Mobile House, 1972 © CSAC, Università di Parma. Sezione Progetto
Mobile House
FIAT Carrozzeria Renzo Orlandi, Carrozzeria Bonsechi, Industria Arredamenti Saporiti, Boffi, with the assistance of Valenti, Nonwoven, Rexedil Patron:
Producers:
Creator of Stile Industria, the first Italian magazine devoted to industrial design, co-founder and president of the ADI industrial design association, promoter of the new Department of Technology and Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Alberto Rosselli was one of the principle members of the first generation in Italy to address the relationship between design and industrial mass production. Through his essays and professional activity Rosselli contributed to the redefinition of both the primary nature of the practice and the cultural tools necessary to the industrial designer. Rosselli embodied a newly emerging professional figure, capable of responding to the needs of industry, and at the same time represented a personal link with the earlier generation of design visionaries such as Gio Ponti and the Italian Rationalists. His proposal for the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape environment seems like a strictly technical response to the MoMA program. Rosselli defined the project as a way to “overcome the limitations of the mobile house by giving it new form of expression, discovering in it the concept of the mobility of interior space, and of its transformation and connection with other spaces”. The living capsule is of aluminium on a steel frame, reflecting “the result of technological research into automobile bodies and aeronautics”. In effect, Rosselli’s project has more in common with the then-current space-age technologies, resembling in its operation and deployment the lunar modules constructed by NASA. The Mobile House was a direct, stripped-down expression of domestic mobility.
Design as Postulation
Marco Zanuso Richard Sapper «Complete and fully equipped habitations, easily transportable and ready for immediate use. This is the theme.» «The theme suggested not so much single habitations to provide city-bound families with a place of occasional retreat as living quarters for entire communities, transported far from metropolises and urban areas.» «Working communities engaged in large-scale public works (…).» «Communities of rescue workers carrying out first-aid operations in areas struck by catastrophe (…).» «Tourist colonies, where it is necessary to respect the natural surroundings (…).» The proposal for a mobile living unit by Marco Zanuso and his partner Richard Sapper displaced the question of domesticity through a sophisticated and prescient consideration of emergency conditions and disaster relief. Just as their scenario of “’earthquakes, cyclones, floods, fires’ may also be read as standing in for other forms of strife, the project evaded any of the specific reflections on communitarian living or post-apocalyptic survival seen in other proposals and positioned itself instead within the logic of an evolving global transportation network. Anticipating the recent contemporary fascination with the efficiency of cargo container housing, the mobile habitation assumed the same dimensions and form as cargo units and was designed to travel by ship, train and helicopter. The project has qualities in common with Buckminster Fuller’s emergency geodesic domes and other architectural models of rapid deployment
and assembly that borrow their minimal design urgency from a military imaginary. Organized into shelters, hospitals or schools, the instant urban features of the project would emerge. While the units have been conceived to be stacked and formed into dense constellations, a relative lightness of impact on the landscape and environment was also a critical concern. As much highly tuned work shed as living space, the functional disposition of the project and its thematic preoccupation with utility was manifest in the collection of tools and implements that the mobile unit displayed in the MoMA exhibition. The deft negotiation of the boundary between questions of human necessity and the design possibilities inherent in new technologies and prefabrication contributed to the success of the team. By 1972 Marco Zanuso was considered one of the masters of post-war Italian design. He was a member of the editorial board of Domus (1945-47) and of Casabella-Continuità (1953-57) under the direction of Ernesto Nathan Rogers, was co-founder of ADI (Association for Industrial Design), and was one of the Italian designers who best expressed the design agenda ’from the spoon to the city’. Especially captivating were Zanuso’s designs for the Brionvega electronics company, combining polished pure forms with the most advanced technology. The mobile living unit was conceived as a similarly refined instrument, and as a perfect industrially produced element for efficient storage, maneuver and delivery to any part of the world.
Patrons:
ANIC-Lanerossi, FIAT, Kartell, Boffi FIAT, with the participation of Boffi, Kartell
Producers:
Environment by Zanuso-Sapper © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Design as Postulation
Mario Bellini (In collaboration with Dario Bellini, Francesco Binfaré, Giorgio Origlia)
Prototype for a mobile environment, 1972 © CSAC, Università di Parma. Sezione Progetto
Kar-a-Sutra Patrons:
Cassina, C&B Italia, with the contribution Citroen, Pirelli.
When he was invited to participate in the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition, Mario Bellini was considered one of the most versatile and interesting, of the new generation of emerging Italia industrial designers. Bellini was a consultant responsible for designing microcomputers, calculators, typewriters and copying-machines for Olivetti (a position in which he succeeded Sottsass Jr.), while working at the same time for Brionvega, Cassina and Flos. Kar-a-Sutra, the proposal for the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape environment, represented Bellini’s sophisticated working process: dealing not with specific form but with the condition itself. Bellini recognized that the car’s inefficiency lay in its poverty of functions and that the most urgent imperative was for the car to perform a more explicit social role. For his contribution to the exhibition, Bellini developed a car-prototype, a “proposal for the present” that envisioned the automobile as a contemporary metropolitan domestic habitat. The project addressed the massive impact of the car within the urban environment, rethinking the vehicle as a “mobile human space, intended for human and not for automotive rites”. While Kar-a-Sutra displays an uncanny prescience in regard to the popular MPVs of the 1980s – Renault’s Espace, for example — its optimistic aim was rather to displace the social function of the car from individual, alienating object to a collective, ecological, communitarian experience.
Design as Commentary
Gaetano Pesce Project for An Underground City in The Age of Great Contaminations Patrons:
Cassina, C&B Italia, Sleeping International System Italia Centro Cassina, Sleeping International System Italia
Producers :
Educated at the IUAV in Venice and founder in the early sixties of the Padua-based Gruppo N that focused on programmed, kinetic and communications art, Gaetano Pesce is recognized as one of the great pioneers in plastic design. His virtuosity in spinning out liquid shapes, cushion forms, building materials and literally any conceivable product in plastic accounts for the development of a prodigious amount of industrial commercial products that have become part of numerous museum collections across the world. Pesce’s sense of irony and social critique, however, know no bounds. His work continuously seeks to shock users, through deeply erotic, violent, or politically provocative messages that permeate these otherwise very common “domestic” elements. Nowhere does this sense of deep and troubling anxiety find stronger expression than in Pesce’s proposal for the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape environment: a plastic molded cubicle habitat based on a fictionalized world in the future where humankind has retreated underground following great global devastation. Partially a tomb for human folly and partially a stage for an
Planometric drawing © Gaetano Pesce
Design as Commentary
orgiastic performance à la “living theater” Pesce’s disturbing vision of where design is meant to take us nonetheless remains the most courageous and artful of the critical environments assembled for the 1972 exhibition. «Habitat habitat as a refuge of isolation from everything else ‘domestic landscape’ and the function of anxiety spaces for events of ritual character tendency for the architecture to express ‘safe’ and meaningful spaces for the user segregation as the hypothesis of an objective choice habitat as a house of eternal life tendency to overcome fear through inflating the idea of death symbolism as a refuge user not the master of physical space but perhaps an anxious protagonist of ritual events within the extremely small arc of his life (yearning for a flexible and elastic habitat) the architect as adversary architecture as a means of negation (end of collaboration in architecture)»
Model by Gaetano Pesce for the Project for an Underground City in the Age of Great Contaminations © James Ewing
Counterdesign as Postulation
Ugo La Pietra
Electronic Guide. Photomontage © Ugo La Pietra archive
The Domicile Cell: A Microstructure within the Information and Communications Systems
Interested in the subversive potential of communications media and their “audio-visual objects”, in the late 1960’s Ugo La Pietra began to develop “unbalancing systems”, a series of physical and mediatic interventions within the urban landscape. Aligned with the “unbalancing actions” of political protest groups, La Pietra’s projects were intended to unsettle perceptions of the city and erode the status of architectural objects. La Pietra’s most critical platform during this period was his role as founding editor of the design magazine IN: Arguments and Images of Design, one of the most far-reaching periodicals to contribute to the shaping of the radical movement in Italy. La Pietra rejected the notion of a fixed domicile as a necessary and primary unit of social organization. Instead, through “audio-privacy systems” and “urban privacy systems”, La Pietra insisted on inhabiting the communications networks that mediate between individual spaces and public structures. These multiple communication systems simultaneously broadcast and registered activities among observers, participants and spontaneous urban audiences. “All this implies charging the domicile cell with an indispensable role in the evolution of ‘organized society.’ The domicile nucleus thus assumes a further role: it becomes a center of gathering, processing, and communicating information, a microstructure that can intervene in the information system by enlarging and multiplying exchanges among people, with everyone participating in the dynamics of communication.”
Counterdesign as Postulation
Archizoom
Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Dario Bartolini, Lucia Bartolini, Massimo Morozzi
Environment by Archizoom © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
GRAY ROOM PatronS:
ABET-Print Giuseppe Chiari
audio SCORE:
Archizoom’s environment can be considered a manifesto of the Counterdesign movement and as a refusal of an excess valuation of urban form, culture and typology. Rather than merely build “different” houses, the project offered, instead, to take possession of space, as a means of “commandeering the houses already built”. The MoMA installation was designed to be entered from one side, through a series of rotating doors that intermittently shut out light and darkened the interior. Wired to both transmit and amplify, a single microphone hung from
the center of the ceiling emitted the lone voice of a young girl. Reverberating its message repeatedly the microphone beckoned the public to speak into it, to participate in the conversation. Postulating feedback and collective involvement as strategies of taking possession that would engender an infinity of utopias, Archizoom chose to break free of the vicious circle of design and consumption by withdrawing from the process itself: “What we use, then, in creating our environment is the least physical thing in the world, namely words. Of course that doesn’t at all mean that in postponing the physical realization of this environment, we have avoided picturing it. On the contrary, we have refused to complete a single image, our own, preferring instead that as many should be created as there are people listening to this tale, who will imagine this environment for themselves, quite beyond our control.” Archizoom’s intention, “to reduce to zero the moral weight of things”, struck out against what they considered to be the false role of the architect in shaping the image of the city. For Archizoom, the memory of the city never existed, since those who truly lived the city inhabited the anomalous zones of its extensive hinterlands. Hence for Archizoom the factory and the supermarket, not 19th-century recollections of the city, were the true environments for contemporary human existence. “There will be good lighting, very bright, that will illuminate all those objects scattered untidily across the floor. And the great thing is it will all be very simple, with no mysteries or eccentricities of expression, you see…”
Counterdesign as Postulation
Superstudio
Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini, Alessandro Poli (1970-1972), Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Photogravure for the film Life/Supersurface, 1972 © Superstudio archive, Florence. Courtesy of Beatrice Lampariello
SupersuRfAce Patron:
ANIC-Lanerossi
In 1972, Superstudio was at the peak of its international fame, the reigning pop stars of the design world with a formidable repertoire: Superarchitecture, Interplanetary Architecture, Twelve Ideal Cities, and the Continuous Monument. Created in 1969, the Continuous Monument extended its Cartesian
grid across entire continents, sweeping aside the laconic encumbrances of architecture’s past. The Monument’s gradual metamorphosis came about in 1972 in New York, when the megastructure unfolded into one great Supersurface. Its infrastructure functioned as a benevolent totality, an endless, featureless plane of information and energy that would render all human life effortless. Superstudio’s installation Microevent/Microenvironment reproduced through lights and mirrors and on film the group’s thesis for a technologically emancipated nomadic society that lived across this endless global platform. The accompanying film, Supersurface: an Alternative Model for Life on Earth, portrayed a sophisticated systems landscape — a wired network provisioned for basic survival, permitting a life stripped of all objects and structured shelters. The Supersurface project would itself be recast into a larger and far more comprehensive program, the Five Fundamental Acts. Life: Supersurface, Ceremony, Education, Love, and Death. “Thus beyond the convulsions of overproduction a state can be born of calm in which a world takes shape without products and refuse, a zone in which the mind is energy and raw material and is also the final product, the only intangible object for consumption. The designing of a region free from the pollution of design is very similar to a design for a terrestrial paradise… This is the definitive product — this is only one of the projects for a marvelous metamorphosis.”
Counterdesign as Postulation
Gruppo Strum
Piero Derossi, Giorgio Ceretti, Carlo Giammarco, Riccardo Rosso, Maurizio Vogliazzo
The Struggle for Housing: photostory cover, 1972 © Gruppo Strum
The Struggle for Housing. Utopia. The Mediatory City. Paolo Mussat Sartor Gufram, Casabella
Photography consultant: Patrons:
The Turin-based Gruppo Strum, an abbreviation for an “instrumental architecture,” was drawn together by a shared interest in pursuing a politicized design and architectural practice. Marxist ideology permeated sixties European counter-culture, and Turin, where Gruppo Strum lived and worked, constituted the frontlines of class struggle in Italy. The city was dominated by the FIAT automobile factory, which throughout the sixties and well into the seventies remained the site of bitter and antagonistic labor struggles. Street agitators, educators and organizers in the struggle for improved labor conditions, housing and legal rights, Gruppo Strum opted to exploit the New York invitation by creating an agit-prop campaign, using the medium of photo-stories to deliver a powerful critique of the class-based culture of profit consumption. Their photo-story magazines, handed out for free to the MoMA public, examined the themes of housing shortages, empty utopias, and the city as a mediatory strategy for worker emancipation. “The city becomes a complex set of old and new tools for use, places to be conquered, and objects to be altered; a great storehouse available to proletarian creativity, enabling those who have rejected the capitalist city, and who are struggling to destroy it, to survive. These are mediatory actions that take place in a continuous process, and they form a mediatory city every day.”
Winners of the Competition for Young Designers
9999
Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi, Paolo Galli
Bedroom of the Vegetable Garden House project for the 1972 MoMA exhibition and catalogue © Carlo Caldini archive
Vegetable Garden House While they belonged to the same design generation, the Florentine group 9999 was nonetheless considered the young upstarts who went on to win Ambasz’s “Competition for Young Designers” in the Environments section. Their project proposal, Vegetable Garden House, featured only a set of poster images. Unlike the other entries there was no built prototype or related film projections. Their images, however, documented a year’s worth of events and projects related to the creation and construction of a prototypical green house that had emerged within an intensely mediatized milieu.
9999’s experiments were developed and assembled in Florence, inside the discothèque the group founded and designed in 1969, Space Electronic. The Space quickly became one of the most experimental social environments in Italy, and featured live happenings, performances, theater and rock music. It was inside the two-storey discothèque that the prototypes for Vegetable Garden House were assembled and temporarily inhabited. The 9999 project was composed of two related experiments with domestic environments, the Vegetable Garden House “Living Room” and “Bedroom.” The first continued a line of investigation initiated with the university project “S-Space (Separated School for Expanded Conceptual Architecture)”, organized in collaboration with Superstudio. The university project took shape through a series of events known as S-Space festivals. The manifestation of the “Living Room” at Space Electronic installed a water pond-garden in the discotheque’s basement and transformed the main music floor into a green living garden. Guests at this event included members of the American radical architecture collective Ant Farm. The project presented in New York was the design for the bedroom, consisting of vegetable garden, water and an airbed. Displacing the MoMA exhibition’s focus on environment as an issue of behaviour or domestic ritual, the group aligned environment with questions of ecology and global transformation. According to 9999, “Our project must be understood, therefore, as the model of a real object, which must find its place in the home. It is an eco-survival device, to be reproduced on a global scale.”
Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB) DHUB General Curator Ramon Prat DHUB Museums Director Marta Montmany
Exhibition: Environments and Counter Environments. «Italy: The New Domestic Landscape», MoMA 1972
Graphic design: Mucho
Organization and production: GSAPP, Columbia University and DHUB
Photographic prints [CSAC archives]: Laboratori Còpia
Curators: Mark Wasiuta, Luca Molinari, Peter Lang
Texts: Mark Wasiuta, Luca Molinari, Peter Lang
Coordinator of contents at DHUB: Carlos Ipser
Translations and corrections: Glòria Bohigas Graham Thomson
European coordination: Viapiranesi Srl
Transport: Gondrand S.p.A SIT
DHUB coordination: Anna Buti, Esperanza Codina Original exhibition design: Mark Wasiuta Adaptation of design for DHUB and production of the exhibition: Emiliana Design Studio
Materials consultancy: Irpen S.A.U.
Insurance: Axa Art MARSH, S.A.
Design Hub Barcelona wishes to express its gratitude to all of the individuals, instituEl Disseny Hub that Barcelona vol part tions and companies have taken in this expressar project: el seu agraïment a les persones, institucions i empreses que han participat en aquest projecte: Emilio Ambasz (Emilio Ambasz & Associates, Inc.); Gae Aulenti and Paolo Durazzo (Studio Gae Aulenti); Gloria Bianchini, Paola Pagliari and Simona Riva (CSAC, Università di Parma. Ambasz (Emilio Ambasz SezioneEmilio Progetto); Adam Bandler (CCCP, Associates, Mario Inc); Gae Aulenti i GSAPP &Exhibitions); Bellini (Mario Paola Durazzo (Estudi Gae ([Archizoom] Aulenti); Bellini Architects); Andrea Branzi Gloria Bianchino, Paola Pagliari Studio Branzi); Gilberto Corretti (Archizoom); Simonaand RivaTeresa (CSAC, Università di Ignazia i Favata Bocchi Galassini Sezione);Progetto); AdamDavid (Studio Parma. Joe Colombo Pietro Derossi, (CCCP, GSAPP Exhibitions); DerossiBandler and Anna Licata (Derossi Associati); Mario Bellini (Mario Bellini ArchiLaura Giordano (Gondrand Fine Arts Dept.); tects); Andrea Branzi Columbia ([Archizoom] Dean Mark Wigley (GSAPP, UniverEstudi Branzi); Ignazia Favata i sity); Ugo La Pietra and Simona Cesana Galassini (Ugo LaTeresa PietraBocchi Archive); Beatriz(Estudi Lampariello; Joe Colombo); Gilberto Corretti Gaetano Pesce and Chrystel Garipuy (Studio (Archizoom); Pietro Derossi, Davide Gaetano Pesce); SAM (Swiss Architecture Derossi i Anna LicataPiero (Derossi AssoMuseum); Richard Sapper); Frassinelli ciati); Laura Giordano (Superstudio Archive); Adolfo(Gondrand Natalini Fine Arts Dept.);Radice; Dean Mark Wigley (Superstudio); Barbara Cristiano Columbia University); Ugo Toraldo(GSAPP, di Francia ([Superstudio] Luccioni and SimonaCarlo Cesana (Ugo ToraldoLa diPietra Francia Studio); Caldini La Pietra Archive); and Fabrizio Fiumi (9999) Beatriz Lampariello; Gaetano Pesce i Chrystel Garipuy (Estudi Gaetano Pesce); S AM (Swiss Architecture Museum); Richard Sapper; Piero Frassinelli (Arxiu Superstudio); Adolfo Natalini (Superstudio); Barbara Radice; Cristiano Toraldo di Francia ([Superstudio] Luccioni Toraldo di Francia Studio); Carlo Caldini i Fabrizio Fiumi (9999)
Detail of Gae Aulenti’s instalation © Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
From 12 November, 2010 to 20 February, 2011 Disseny Hub Barcelona Montcada, 12 08003 Barcelona T 93 256 23 00
[email protected]
Opening times: Tuesday to Friday , 11 am to 7 pm Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays 11 am to 8 pm
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Exhibition producer by: GSAPP, Columbia University and DHUB European coordinators: Viapiranesi Srl
www.dhub-bcn.cat
