Made in Italy

Rethinking a Century of Italian Design

Grace Lees-Maffei, Kjetil Fallan, Grace Lees-Maffei, Kjetil Fallan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857853905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Conception
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique de la conception

Goods made or designed in Italy enjoy a profile which far outstrips the country's modest manufacturing output. Italy's glorious design heritage and reputation for style and innovation has 'added value' to products made in Italy. Since 1945, Italian design has commanded an increasing amount of attention from design journalists, critics and consumers. But is Italian design a victim of its own celebrity? Made in Italy brings together leading design historians to explore this question, discussing both the history and significance of design from Italy and its international influence. Addressing a wide range of Italian design fields, including car design, graphic design, industrial and interior design and ceramics, well-known designers such as Alberto Rosselli and Ettore Sottsass, Jr. and iconic brands such as Olivetti, Vespa and Alessi, the book explores the historical, cultural and social influences that shaped Italian design, and how these iconic designs have contributed to the modern canon of Italian-inspired goods.

1 A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ITALIAN DESIGN

MADDALENA DALLA MURA AND CARLO VINTI

INTRODUCTION

By 2011, the year marking the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification, Italian design had seen more than its fair share of rhetoric. Certain exhibitions and publications have portrayed its history as key to understanding Italian society and identity, as well as being a stimulus for the future. According to this reading, after the Second World War, and in the wake of the economic miracle, a design phenomenon occurred, thanks to a relatively small group of passionate men and thanks, too, to enlightened (Milanese/Lombard) leaders of small and medium-sized companies, all of whom were motivated by a deep sense of beauty rather than by strictly commercial agendas. Although this process was chronologically behind that of other modern nations, Italian design maintained an avant-garde position. A group of products associated with the idea that Italian design and manufacture were superior, encapsulated in the slogan ‘made in Italy’, was established, ranging from domestic goods to automobiles. These products blended perceived artistic genius with excess, and rigorous design with traditional craftsmanship. A special approach to design developed that has contributed to reshaping daily life in Italy, while also becoming an internationally recognised model of high culture. This reading of Italian design as held together by a presumed unity reflects a historical and critical construction developed over a long period of time, one that requires revising so that a wider range of views may be taken into account.

The aim of this bibliographical essay is twofold: first, to outline the main features of historical writing on ‘Italian design’ up to the present century and, second, to examine the more diversified readings and lines of research that, over the past three decades, have dealt with the history of design in Italy and may help in re-examining the very idea of Italian design.

THE SINGULARITY OF ITALIAN DESIGN: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION

. . . a very special, strange, and paradoxical situation, that of Italy, because while the ‘official’ profession of ‘industrial designer’ does not exist, there are personalities who are imposing themselves in the world right in the field of industrial design.¹

Here, in a 1952 edition of Domus magazine, Alberto Rosselli described the situation of Italian design and the canon of the ‘Linea Italiana’. He invited designers and entrepreneurs to ‘close ranks’ around Italian design so that it might be recognised on the international market in association with a country ‘whose vocation had always been to “create beauty” ’. Rosselli renewed this call for Italian identity in 1960 in his magazine Stile Industria (see Kjetil Fallan’s chapter in this volume) with a scrapbook-like series of notes and images edited by Bruno Alfieri. Covering the years 1939 to 1959, these notes and images sought to demonstrate the maturity of Italian industrial design in contrast to the crisis being reported by many within the Italian community of design.²

If it is true that historical writing started by chronicling heroes and events, it is precisely here in the 1950s–1960s—where a collective memory is built by those directly involved in the shaping of such events—that one identifies the first traces of the historiography of Italian design. Since then, there have been different and even conflicting constructions of these events. However, a double assumption seems to bind many of these accounts to those early reports: that an identifiably Italian design exists and that it is a singular type of design. The idea of this atypical feature—whether considered as a positive quality to sustain or as a deficiency that needs healing—has been particularly maintained by those authors, mainly Italian, who have attempted to give an account of the history of Italian design in its entirety.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s debates continued about whether Italian design had reached maturity. Those who thought it had not had tended to compare it to the international situation in cultural terms, and with specific reference to the methodological and pedagogical legacy of the modern movement. Italian design oscillated between aspirations towards modernism and the rise of experiences that were theoretically and practically distant from it. Traces of this tension can be found in the varying notations with which, in 1968, the architect Vittorio Gregotti outlined the development of industrial design in Italy. Gregotti deemed the Italian experience as far from mature and characterised by production problems, in spite of its aesthetic joy. But while he placed the origins of Italian design within architectural culture, he also identified episodes of good design that had arisen ‘spontaneously’ from industry itself.³

Within just a few years, however, others placed the question of Italy’s unique condition and its history outside the realm of international modernism. The exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, held in 1972 at the Museum of Modern Art and curated by Emilio Ambasz, introduced an American public to recent Italian design and architecture, showing that Italy had developed, and perceived itself, as an island outside of the European mainstream. In order to understand Italian design—it was explained—it was necessary to recover its historical origins and Italy’s successive efforts towards modernity. Therefore, art nouveau and futurism as well as rationalism (the modern architecture and design movement in Italy, which began in the interwar years) appeared in the exhibition’s catalogue essays.⁴

Also in 1972, historian and art critic Paolo Fossati declared that the alleged crisis of Italian design was a problem of discourse rather than of facts. The problem centred on the dominance of an interpretative model, functionalism, that was external to the Italian experience and therefore unable to account for its unique features and ambiguity. In his book Il design in Italia, 1945–1972, Fossati traced the ‘prehistory’ of the 1930s and 1940s and the ‘history’ of the 1950s and 1960s in Italian design as the context for portraits of ten exemplary designers.⁵ This account revealed that Italian design had essentially grown out of ‘the shackles of the industrial system’⁶ and of the functionalist ideal. Italian designers—who were not recognised as professionals—had worked rather in the promotion of existing products and with small industry, and arts and crafts practitioners, eventually developing formal solutions that, although not ‘against’ function in any strict sense, were always ‘beyond’ it, since they added ‘something more’ in terms of meaning. To sustain Italian design, Fossati claimed, an interdisciplinary openness towards architecture and the arts should be emphasised.

Clearly moving in the opposite direction was Gregotti. In his essay for the catalogue of the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition he focused on the post-war years of Italian design and broadened the chronicle of events, products and designers, up to the historicisation of the post-1950s crisis. He accused Italian design of mirroring the ‘worst defects of our national character’,⁷ of being improvised and superficial, detached from society and generally lacking a real industrial culture. Gregotti’s criticism of contemporary design compelled him to return repeatedly to the history of Italian design, with an industry-focused revisionism. He sought a context for contemporary designers based on a renewed sense of rationality, free from utopian and nihilistic tendencies. Through a series of collaborative publications,⁸ Gregotti retraced the pragmatic and technical vein of the cultura del progetto (culture of design) back to the beginnings of industrialisation in Italy. Using the year 1860 as a starting point, he produced the first major chronological, geographical, typological and iconographic contribution to the history of Italian design. His wide-ranging study included heavy industry, patents, schools and museums of industrial arts, exhibitions and department stores, office and military equipment, airplanes and bicycles while not forgetting handicrafts, stile liberty (art nouveau) and futurism. His account, resolutely emphasising design as an industrial project, could not have gone unnoticed. For instance, Giovanni Klaus Koenig, an architect, designer and scholar, hailed it as the first draft of a ‘true and complete’ history of Italian industrial design and production, as he no doubt appreciated the ample treatment of anonymous products and episodes usually neglected by critical discourse.⁹ On the other side, Gregotti’s version of events did not please those who felt they had entered the ‘second modernity’.

If one is to adopt the notions that were then in circulation, it could be argued that from the 1970s–1980s onwards, two streams of historical writing developed: on the one hand, the cold strand, representative of those who continued to associate Italian design with ‘industrial design’ and, ultimately, with the principles of modernism, however critically interpreted; and, on the other, the hot strand of the new avant-garde movements that were strategically engaged on several fronts, from magazines to exhibitions, in an effort to redefine design ‘without specifications’ as an alternative to the modernist orthodoxy.

Theorists of radical design attempted to rescue the history of Italian design from the umbrella of modernism with an approach that, although never taking the form of historical enquiry, strongly influenced critical and historical discourse on Italian design, not least thanks to a style steeped in paradox and tautology. A first step in this process of appropriation was the exhibition Il Design Italiano Degli Anni ’50 of 1977, which displayed design classics alongside crafts, small-batch productions, graphics and applied arts. In the catalogue, Andrea Branzi, one of the curators, maintained that post-war Italian design had been a style rather than an effective tool of sociocultural reform, and was a precursor of ‘postmodernist choice’.¹⁰

Subsequently, Branzi retraced the ancient origins and historical continuities of a design culture that, as he argued in his book The Hot House (1984), has never really been industrial and has instead developed as a metalanguage, an ‘opposition movement’.¹¹ Focused almost exclusively on the culture of the domestic sphere, Branzi drew attention to nineteenth-century eclecticism, crafts, decoration and the applied arts tradition, the scandalous modernity of futurism, the Latin modernity of metafisica and ‘irrational’ rationalism, neoliberty, pop art and fashion. Furthermore, in his Introduzione al design italiano (1999) Branzi placed Italian design within the broader cultural, social and political history of Italy, which he saw as a ‘long period of crisis and discontinuity’, always ‘far ahead and far behind’ Europe’s developments and revolutions, as he explained.¹² Branzi’s writing not only further emphasised the stereotype of Italian backwardness apparent in other accounts but also turned it into a positive rhetorical myth that pitted Italy’s incomplete modernity against an idealised European modernity.¹³

Within the space between the divergent ideological histories that Gregotti and Branzi offered, more diverse historical writing developed. Besides exhibition catalogues riding the wave of New Design, rhetorically furthering the myth of Italian design, an increasing interest in design history in the 1980s led to the recovery and study of events that up until then had remained obscured. In particular, some Italian authors felt the need to bring the by then diversified history of Italian design back under the mantle of industrial design and modernity. While these attempts did not eradicate the idea of the singularity of Italian design, they revealed the problematic nature of an assumption that would gradually cease to function without thorough critical reflection on its very construction.

Anty Pansera is one such author. Since the end of the 1970s, she has maintained a consistent concern for the historiography of Italian design.¹⁴ An art historian with a background in social history, Pansera aimed to clarify the history of Italian industrial design—which she, like other scholars, identifies with Milan and Lombardy—and design’s ‘official’ and public dimension. Her work was therefore intended to be distinct from the anti-institutional redefinition carried out by radical design and from those accounts, such as Gregotti’s, that risked dispersing the autonomy of design into too vast an industrial culture. Using primary sources and collaborating with other authors, Pansera has addressed the main fields of Italian design production and has, in addition, revealed the organisational structure existing in and around institutions and associations, exhibitions, magazines and awards. While not always succeeding in contextualising this life within the wider Italian socio-economic and political context (as she usually focuses on the closed system of the design community), Pansera’s contribution is significant, valuable and replete with suggestions for further investigation.

A more selective reading of events is presented by the architect and historian of art and architecture Renato De Fusco. Since the late 1970s De Fusco had championed historiography as a means of producing a synthetic discourse from the messy facts of reality. In the 1980s and 1990s, he achieved some influence over the development of Italian design historiography. In his 1985 international survey history of design, De Fusco traced the development of design in various countries as they gained a leading role in the international arena, with a final chapter on Italian design.¹⁵ Focusing on paradigmatic works and themes, he read them through a ‘quatrefoil’ grid, as he called it, based on the coexistence of four aspects—project, production, sale and consumption—as a way of understanding design. This grid approach, however, once again portrayed Italy as anomalous, since there, as in no other country, those four moments appeared to be separated. And this very separation, according to De Fusco, was at the root of ‘all sorts of contradictions’¹⁶ in Italian design—this is how he values aspects of the latter such as individualism, the aesthetic emphasis, the persistence of craftsmanship and the high cost of products.

Around the same time, the architect and designer Enzo Frateili also published bo...