Master of Architecture Thesis Rice University 
italian radical design movement l 1960s-1970s 

[f4]
Superonda Sofa 
by Andrea Brazini, Archizoom Associates, 1966
[f5]
Kar-a-sutra 
by Mario Bellini, 1972

An object in most people’s lives, a car, re-imagined by Bellini in a more playful and flexible manner.
[f6]
Exhibition guests are viewing the objects placed in the display boxed in the museum courtyard. Placing objects into display boxes requires the visitor to pause and look at what is inside, even if it were to seem mundane or uninteresting outside of the box. 
[f7]
Tube Chair 
by Joe Colombo, 1969-1970


While taking a seat is something people do every day, when approaching these obscure seats, the designers invite the user to think about an action as mundane as sitting. 

[f8] 
Pratone 
by Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Riccardo Rossi, 1971

While taking a seat is something people do every day, when approaching these obscure seats, the designers invite the user to think about an action as mundane as sitting. 
Italy’s radical design movement took shape in 1966 and continued through the early 1970s as it disseminated internationally. A movement which started in Florence, where students under Leonardo Savioli’s guidance were encouraged to explore and redefine the ways of living. A movement that might not have come to light if a group of people were not encouraged to experiment with designing abnormal day-to-day objects. Although the duration in which new designs were surfacing lasted around a decade, the impact on design-thinking was strong and lasting.

The movement was defined by the development of Superarchitettura and their Radical Manifesto. Within the manifesto they state, “Superarchitettura is the architecture of superproduction, super consumption, superinduction to consume, the supermarket, the superman, super petrol.”(2) This initial group eventually split to create Archizoom and Superstudio. Abnormally designed objects surfacing and entering conversations was the initial layer, but the fabrication and mass production of these objects is what allowed for the breakthrough to happen. Companies such as Artemide, Zanotta, Danese, and perhaps the most significant, Poltronova, took on fabricating and working with the designers of this time. These companies still exist today while actively fabricating some of the designs that originally turned heads inciting excitement and confusion.

While Florence was the origin of influential individuals and ideas, the collection of ideas and designs quickly made its curated entry to the United States in 1972 through one of the most established contemporary art museums, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, under the exhibition named, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.”  An exhibition about domestic spaces and objects intrinsically asks the viewers to dance between attentive and distracted states. The objects displayed alternated between being extremely foreign, where it made sense for it to be showcased, to being so familiar with nuanced interventions that viewers questioned what they should be analyzing. Different parts of the exhibition allowed for varied degrees of interaction or required pure observation. For the sake of this exhibition, the range of permitted interaction seems successful. The objects are not all showcased the same, nor in the expected manner. The visitor maybe forgets they are in a museum, wanting to sit on and decide which couch is the comfiest. However, only some seating arrangements are allowed to be interacted with, while others are placed in rows of display boxes requiring the viewer to think about how they might sit. The display boxes highlight the individual object, taking away all other context it would be associated with.

The effects of the unique condition of displaying the domestic is a parallel to the thesis’s interest in provoking intentional attentive states and accompanies Benjamin’s discussion on the normative state of architecture being digested in a distractedly  

A literary preparation was compiled to ensure a holistic understanding for the exhibition viewers, one the distracted viewer might have overlooked. In this literary curation there is a collection of historical articles reflecting and summarizing the significant moments of Italy’s design history. Followed up by a collection of critical essays in which a group of Italian design critics were asked to analyze the exhibition’s contents in a specific context. One of the critics, Filberto Menna, titled his essay, “A Design for New Behaviors” and discusses the crisis situation of the design of objects for consumption. In a portion of his essay he discusses, “the imaginary object and the real object,” explaining the transmittance of ideas. Menna’s discussion of the imaginary and real reflect Benjamin’s thoughts on capturing attention. Menna illustrates an artist straddling between the imaginary and real, suspending their ideas somewhere in between in an effort to bring a beauty of their imagined world, into the widely accepted real world. He states, “Transitional moments include a whole series of experiences, such as play and artistic activity, which so to speak lie halfway between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.”(3)  This transitional state Menna describes is one that requires the contemplation of the viewer. If consumed in a distracted state, the idea would simply not be understood. Producing images suspended in between reality and imagination, is the artist’s attempt to capture attention and avoid dismissal. If the idea was presented in complete reality, it would lose too much of the artist’s vision and fall victim to being consumed distractedly. If the idea is presented in the complete imagination, the artist could fail to capture attention through understanding reality, and again fall victim to being consumed distractedly. A strong statement from Menna capturing his feelings on the significance of the imagination opposing the reality is as follows. “On the other hand, the perfect, harmonious universe glimpsed by the artist in his imagination and rendered tangible in his work does not consent to an acceptance of a separate, divided, unhappy life, but demands a radical change in real existence.”(4) In the context of this thesis, demand for radical change can be seen in the design. When a designed condition grabs the attention of a user before going through a habitual task, the designer has welcomed the user into their world of imagination while the user goes through their state of reality.

(2) “Superarchitettura,” Wikipedia, June 1, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superarchitettura.
(3) Filiberto Menna, “A Design for New Behaviors,” in Italy: the New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. Edited by Emilio Ambasz. (Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn. 1972), 409.
(4) Ibid, 410.

Feyza Mutlu
Master of Architecture Thesis
Rice University School of Architecture linkedin.com/in/feyza-mutlu
fnmutlu1@gmail.com
@fnmutlu1