Anti design
Parent categories: anti- - design
Related: Italian design - modern design - Radical Design -
Description
A movement that emerged in Italy during the later 1960s, following Ettore Sottsass's 1966 exhibition of furniture in Milan. The group rejected the formalist values of the neo-modern design movement in Italy and sought to renew the cultural and political role of design, believing that the original aims of Modernism had become no more than a marketing tool. In contrast to Modernism, the movement was founded on a belief in the importance of object's social and cultural value as well as its aesthetic function. Employing all the design values rejected by modernism, it embraced ephemerality, irony, kitsch, strong colors and distortions of scale to undermine the purely functional value of an object, and question concepts of taste, and "good design" . Sottsass spearheaded the activities which were carried out in individual groups; these were to consolidate as the Memphis group in the 1980s. --http://www.italianfurnishings.com/glossary/glossary.shtml [Mar 2006]
More on this movement here:
In the United States, in short, it was only funk architecture and the hippie movement’s experiences of constructing its own buildings that accepted “contamination” from existential experiences or from contemporary experimentation in the field of the arts, as if to take the place of a research that, however critical, was still carried out in relation to the “presence” of the undisputed masters of European modernism: Mies, Gropius, Schindler, Kiesler. While their theoretical assumptions and languages may be reinterpreted, it was rare for doubts to be raised about the instruments they used in design. In Europe, on the other hand, the early experiments moved on from the initial utopian vision to a progressive maturation, to the point where they were able to accept irony and allow their own visionary outlook to be used as a means of questioning the canons of the profession. Thus European architecture saw the emergence of an experimental attitude that was wholly independent of previous legacies but influenced instead, and developed in concord with, the climate of linguistic and experimental renewal of the other creative disciplines and the changes that were taking place in culture and lifestyle on the urban scene. The British group called Archigram, whose “utopian” approach to design was also applied to the large scale and to new models of cities or urban macrostructures, is emblematic of this different attitude, which was to surface almost contemporaneously in Austria, with Hollein and Pichler, and in Italy, with Archizoom and Superstudio. In the London of the early sixties the new languages of representation and expression, derived chiefly from pop culture and adopted and diffused by the mass media, had triggered an explosion of innovation and creativity. In contrast, the established architectural culture found itself unable to deal with the new urban reality, and therefore incapable of influencing an environment shaped by phenomena and models linked to mass culture. Archigram, with the boldness that came from a sense of irony, carried out an operation with regard to the profession that was at once a conceptual revolution and a linguistic renewal: in other words, a type of design that on the theoretical plane accepted and even laid claim to the characteristics of the consumer and mass-oriented society, those of transience and dynamism, of continual and necessary flexibility and of evolution in the functions of an urban environment, expressing them in the visually-alluring languages of the media, science-fiction cartoons, brightly-colored collages and magazines in which the articles were illustrated with pop icons. --http://www.giannipettena.it/inglese/radical/ecentro.htm [Mar 2006]