Italy's Dynamic Furniture

Centers shift, in design as in other arts. Fifteen years ago, modern design still meant Scandinavia--birchwood tables and Wirkkala ceramics. Not today: the node from which the most inventive impulses in design now issue is Italy. Italian designers dominate their field in the '70s much as New York painters dominated theirs in the '60s. Last week in Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art opened an impressive display of home furnishings and environments entitled Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. The show gives a fascinating overview of the projects--commercial, speculative and Utopian--that have occupied designers in Milan, Turin, Florence and Rome for the past decade.

What is documented by the display is the struggle of designers to free themselves from their traditional limbo, somewhere between architecture and interior decoration. More and more, design strives to be active: its tutelary gods are no longer Chippendale or the Bauhaus, but Buckminster Fuller, Marcuse and Ronald Laing. The thrust of designers like Ettore Sottsass, Gae Aulenti, Marco Zanuso and the "Archizoom" group is not to decorate the psychic space around us but to extend and question it. This means a critical approach to social patterns, which starts with the language of shape.

Giant Tensor. There has always been a feedback between the "fine" and the "applied" arts, and some Italian designers approach this in a deliberately eclectic and unsettling way. Thus Claes Oldenburg's funky gigantism is parodied in Gaetano Pesce's "Moloch" floor lamp: a tensor desk light enlarged to a height of 9 ft. And, just as many a Victorian bronze looked better with a lampshade than as sculpture, the use of neon tubing becomes laconically appropriate in Ettore Sottsass's "Asteroid" lamp. What goes on with such designers is not a passive borrowing of fine-art motifs but, as Museum Curator Emilio Ambasz puts it, an "ironic manipulation of the sociocultural meanings attached to existing forms."

In this parade of exquisitely designed objects, from lamps to ashtrays to such inviting modular sofas as Mario Bellini's "Chameleon" cushion system (see color page), it is apparent that the functionalist concerns of the Bauhaus are receding. Some emphasis has shifted to furniture as dream or fetish or ikon. Thus Gae Aulenti designs a variable bookcase/shelf/sleeping-platform unit that, glittering in vermilion fiber glass, resembles a Mayan sacrificial altar; while Sottsass's red ceramic vase has the archaic look of a ziggurat.

The most original work in the show is an acute speculation on furniture as sign. For objects embody attitudes, and they are incredibly resistant to social change: they crystallize, and dictate, roles. It is easy to be authoritarian from an office armchair; difficult when sprawled in a beanbag; on a waterbed, impossible. In a country like Italy, where the kitchen is still a kind of sacred cave presided over by a mother-goddess, the design of a cooking module that can be rolled about and plugged in anywhere has profound implications. Not, perhaps, the immediate death of the nuclear family--but certainly a substantive critique of it. The Italians are rethinking such ideas as privacy and discarding the concept of furniture as possession--the "antiques of tomorrow" syndrome. Ettore Sottsass proposes as his ideal public "people who don't wish to hide, who don't feel the need ... to live in houses that are nothing other than cemeteries containing the tombs of their own memories." Furniture appropriate for that kind of public must respond to hourly changes of life and function.

Survival Kits. This revulsion from the stiffly programmed machine for living has been shared by many other designers, including the brilliant Joe Colombo, who died in 1971 at 41. Of his canary-yellow and white "total furnishing unit," Colombo wrote: "The space should be dynamic; that is, it should be in a continual state of transformation." With its sliding beds and intricate storage nests, Colombo's prototype is as compact as the toilet of a 707--and, at first sight, as cold. But its sense of compressed variability infuses much of the work in the show, from Internotredici's desk/bed/sitting-room "monoblock" to such instant houses as Alberto Rosselli's capsule. Looking like the giant offspring of a Xerox machine and an old camera, the capsule can be trucked anywhere like a container--serving, in effect, as a crate for its own furniture. On site, the sides fold down to become floor, and the bellows walls expand to a total plan area of some 3,000 square feet--more than the average suburban house.

In such projects, the unity of "building" and "design" is complete. They are survival kits for Spaceship Earth--and part of their message is to insist that fantasy, play and a sense of archetype are essential to survival. In detail, the Museum of Modern Art show sets forth the key problem of radical design--how to use the stupendous resources of capitalist technology to dissolve the more rigid roles and postures that capitalism imposes. In a sense, the Italians' doubts are as rich as their solutions.

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