Page 61 - Studio International - July August 1973

boat a scarcely visible speck on the horizon. We merchandising needs not by the shortcomings of
are meant to know that it is going away. The existing cutlery. There appears to be no
survivors have another day to endure before reason to design a new knife, fork or spoon
they are sighted. q unless somebody requires a gimmick to sell, or
ANDREW FORGE where Veblen's laws of conspicuous
consumption, as reformulated by Marcuse,
apply.
Design's last tango Fossati, in his book, and Bruno Zevi in his
Il Designo in Italia 1945 -1972 by Paulo review of it in Espresso, 25 March 1973, seem
Fossatti. 255 + xiv pp., 508 illustrations, some to see a difference between the designer's
in colour. Einaud . 10,000 lire (from Tirranti, role - or lack of it - and place in Italy and his
£9.00). role and place elsewhere, above all in
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape - Scandinavia. Yet the phrase, 'professional
Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ability without a profession', describes a fairly
edited by Emilio Ambasz. 432 pp., 52o widespread situation, and places the designer
illustrations, 124 in colour. Museum of Modern alongside the many craftsmen of advertising.
Art, New York, distributed by Idea Books in The structural drama, as Zevi phrases it, is that
UK. £5.00. of an activity, by definition part of an industrial
process but denied organic integration into
Since the end of the last war, Italian design has that process and reduced to the cosmesis of
enjoyed outside Italy roughly the same the product, to its restyling. The designer, as
treatment it had received in Italy before the the Museum of Modern Art's volume aptly
war : the alternate bullying and blandishment displays, acquires a reputation but not a role
that rich men and architects reserve for their (figura and ruolo in Fossati's original Italian).
mistresses. These two books chronicle that Exiled from his proper place, condemned to
last tango. It is a mixture of chic and marginal areas of activity, the designer applies a
seriousness, of refined formal invention and rootless imagination and a directionless fancy to
sharp redefinition of function. On the one hand objects that at times reach the heights of
reaching for social significance and on the fashionable cult; and the windows of Habitat
other hunting social position, design in Italy, and the pages of the Sunday supplements are
more rapidly than elsewhere, reached a crisis of copied a thousand times wherever the new chic
self-contradiction and shiftless motivation - of arrivism needs a tailored linage.
only in part demonstrated by the Neo-Liberty It is as well to recall that the instigators of
movement. this inflationary stylishness were originally
The crisis is only apparently exclusively serious designers. Fossati's book, though
Italian, due to the fact that Italian design has especially valuable for its opening essay that
been consistently pre-eminent. It is only just reaches back to the thirties, discusses Italian
beginning to affect England because political design since the war in ten monographic
consciousness is only now beginning to dawn studiesof the ten outstanding 'personalities' :
on English designers. In brief, design can no Albini, Munari, Carlo Scarpa, Rogers, Zanuso,
longer be merely the pleasant and acceptable Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni, Rosselli, Sambonet
face of capitalism, but can it be anything else ? and Mari. Most of them men of polymathic
The separation of form and function is merely qualifications and activity. Albini, Scarpa,
another aspect of superannuated Aristotelian Rogers, Zanuso, Sottsass, Castiglioni and
aesthetics, of the dichotomy form and content. Rosselli are architects; Munari, Sottsass,
In the thirties, by stressing the rational Sambonet and Mari experiment in other arts,
aspects of architecture and design, Figini, and not unsuccessfully. All of them are pre-
Pollini, Albini, Nizzoli, Munari, Persico and a eminent in Italian design without being
number of others could confront design exclusively so, and perhaps this preserves them
problems without inhibition and propose from the desperate status-hunger that appears
solutions of a formal daring - later dismissed by endemic to design practice elsewhere.
the envious as a structural romanticism - that All of them - except Carlo Scarpa who is
somehow bypassed arguments of a functional Venetian, willingly and wilfully - centre their
nature. Albini's 'suspension' bookshelf springs activities on Milan and belong to the
readily to mind. Form, Italian designers were community of artists, architects, writers,
discovering, does not necessarily follow critics, and intellectuals there. This may well
function, indeed often function follows form; be a strength, a saving grace. In the question of a
to put it another way, function is simply the specific Italian style, this easy intercourse has
pre-established relationships of forms. For been a vital factor, along with Milan's special
example, the need to get food into one's mouth position as the leading middle-class city of
cannot alone determine the Chinese use of Italy. Design has been declared the prior
chopsticks and the West's insistence upon middle-class art; and it flourishes where the
knives and forks; but given the form of the middle class flourishes, where this is the
implements, the form of the food follows. The ascending class, the decisive-class. The Italian
only necessary formal evolution of eating middle class, especially the Milanese, has
implements will arise out of increasing grown enormously recently, absorbing into
specialization, generally dictated by itself the fresh recruits thrown up by the vast
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