MyriemMsefer_RicardoBoffil-0516

Delorean - The Time Machine

We definetely can say that we are the big  part of the „Back To The Future“ generation. Who would not know amazing DeLorean DMC-12 or the October 21st, 2015? 80s was a culture that shaped our future that we curently live in. 

In its time, the DeLorean Motor Company was an epic falure, but it gained more fame over the years than any other vehicle of the 20th century. 

When Back to the Future was filmed in 1985, America was in the midst of a cultural shift. The computer world was coming alive. Apple introduced the concept of desktop computing. Nintendo realeased its first gaming system. And as well DeLorean`s increadible architecture and stainless steel body came to our world. 

„Doc“ (from character BTTF) transformed DeLorean from a stainless steel car into the iconic time machine and gave Marty McFly the confidence to „think different.“„She“ was the game changer. 

The DMC-12 ended up with an underpowered engine that made less than a measly 200 horsepower and sputtered from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 10 seconds. Less than 10,000 DeLorean DMC-12s were made. 

Legendary car and product designer Giorgetto Giugiaro is behind all of this. The fact that DeLoreans still look futuristic today speaks volumes.

Giugiaro had designed such notable autos as the Maserati Bora, Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT, Volkswagen Scirocco, and Lotus Esprit. DeLorean Company considered Giugiaro one of the world’s greatest automotive engineers and designers. They was correct. Giugiaro presented a design that looks as modern today as it did in 1981. Even standing still, the DeLorean appears to be in motion. The body sets the car apart from anything else on the road. The paint can’t chip or fade, and it’s impervious to rust.

The DeLorean DMC-12 seems to have found its place in time. There’s just something about a failed car that ends up saving the future. 

naoualcohen_03-05-2016

In 1960 during the Tokyo World Design Conference a group of young architects and designers including Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho and FumihikoMaki prepared the publication of the Metabolism manifesto:

 - megastructures
- a city could be extruded in a single building, or a relatively small number of buildings interconnected together
- ocean city, space city, towards group form
- material and man 
- plug-in capsule towers that could incorporate organic growth

Viaggio nelle regione della ragione, superstudio, 1968-69

Superstudio : Florence, 1966 
Architecture firm that was a major part of the RADICAL architecture movement of the late 1960s.

Adolfo Natalini 
Cristiano Toraldo di Francia 
Gian Pietro Frassinelli
Alessandro Magris 
Roberto Magris 
Alessandro Poli

established three categories of future research: "architecture of the monument" the "architecture of the image" and "technomorphic architecture" 

-conceptual architecture works
- 1969 Continious Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization.

Sturm Group: 
emerged in Tokyo in 1966 by Giorgio ceretti, Pietro Derossi and Ricardo Rosso and used architecture to produce political propaganda by using irony and fiurative forms.

Radical movement of design

In Italian design, the "Radical period" took place in the late 1960s, with a shift in style among the avant-garde. Probably the most notable result of this avant-garde period is the installation called "Superarchitettura", made in Pistoia in 1966.

Another important studio was located in Milan and called "STUDIODADA". Members of STUDIODADA included: Ada Alberti, Dario Ferrari, Maurizio Maggi, Patrizio Corno, Marco Piva and Paolo Francesco Piva. Other professionals of that period were: David Palterer, Tomo Ara, Battista Luraschi, Bepi Maggiori, Alberto Benelli, Pino Calzana, etc.

In addition, a movement called "Postmodernism" or "Neomodernism" was led by Alessandro Mendini, director of reviews like "Casabella", "Modo" and "Domus" from 1980 to 1985. Mendini's postmodernism inspired exhibitions like "L'interno oltre la forma dell'utile" (Interior space after the form of usefulness) held at the Triennale di Milano in 1980.

- Opposed to rationalism and the primacy of design on the social and cultural role of architecture

- Needs of individuals over any other consideration 

- irreverent designs questioning the praticality and taste of the previous design

- utopian city of the future 

- free human being from the manual labor

- Superstudio and Archizoom invented "superarchitecture" 

- They praticed a social radicalism declaring "to have the right to be against a reality that is meaningless"

- discovery of the concept of the void and neutral

- using of the Polyurethane

ABS and the more sophisticated production preocess, like injected molding.

- the concept of enlightenment as sculptural element. 

- Joe Colombo and the Castignoli brothers were responsible for some of the most innovative light designs in decade.

ARCO

by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni

Archizoom's main features 

- against Capitalism and consumerism 

- questioned of "good design" 

- they continued pop art's tradition by using bold colors and innotiative materials 

- they used kich and pop to go against elegant lines for what italian design was recognized worlwide

- they ran counter to a reality that is missing 'meaning'

- turned italian design into a kind of firework ideas

Allesandro Mendini

Alessandro Mendini (born 16 August 1931 in Milan) is an Italian designer and architect. He played an important part in the development of Italian design. He also worked, aside from his artistic career, for Casabella, Modo and Domus magazines.

His design has been characterized by his strong interest in mixing different cultures and different forms of expression; he creates graphics, furniture, interiors, paintings and architectures and wrote several articles and books; he is also renowned as an enthusiastic member of jury in architectural competition for young designers. 

The yellow tower of the Groninger Museum was designed by Alessandro Mendini

Fauteuil Poltrona di Proust

- for him it was possible to produce modern design

- full of irony

Micelle de luchi

Michele De Lucchi studied in Padua and the University of Florence under the direction of Adolfo Natalini. In 1973, he founded the design group that promoted the radical design. In 1978, he worked in the Kartell design studio in Milan. There he met Ettore Sottsass and they participated to the first exhibition. He conceived in 1979 many postmodernists prototypes for home use. They were not put into production but were impacted by the radical forms. Then he became a consultant for Olivetti.

First chair, 1983

Andrea Branzi

Branzi was born in Florence where he also graduated in architecture in 1966 with his project "Supermarket- Luna Park", a reproduction of this project "Luna Park II" (2001) is at Centre Georges Pompidou. Currently he lives and works in Milan, Italy, where he moved in 1973.

His work and interests relate to industrial design, architecture, urban planning, and cultural promotion. 

Together with Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Gilberto Coretti, Dario and Lucia Bartolini he founded the Archizoom Associati in 1966. He is a promoter of the Italian Radical Architecture movement. From the Radical Period, came the very famous Superarchitettura theoretical framework, which brought his work to Anti-Design. From 1976, he participated in the movement Alchimia, founded by Alessandro Guerriero. The movement was defined as a laboratory for experimental industrial design. 

His enormous work Vase is on permanent display in the courtyard of the Design Museum in Gent. In 2008 he installed his work Open Enclosures at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

In 2008 Andrea Branzi was named an Honorary Royal Designer in the United Kingdom. The same year he launched a series of shelf units and console tables entitled "Trees", which were exhibited at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris.

Ettore Sottsass

- while furniture industry will cast insults on the "useless, ugly, tasteless", on the contrary they took advantage of their product.

As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova,Knoll International, Serafino Zani, Alessi and Brondi. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of Apple's first computer mouse, inWoodside, California. In the mid-1990s, he designed the sculpture garden and entry gates of the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg Gallery at the campus of Cal Poly Pomona. He collaborated with well-known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun.

Sottsass had a vast body of work; furniture, jewellery, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings which inspired generations of architects and designers. In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first major museum survey exhibition of his work in the United States. A retrospective exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress, was held at the Design Museumin London in 2007. In 2009, the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht presented a re-construction of a Sottsass' exhibition 'Miljö för en ny planet' (Landscape for a new planet), which took place in the National Museum in Stockholm in 1969.

Knoll Mandarin Chair Ettore Sottsass

Typewriter Valentine (1969)

- their products were tipically "national"

- renaissance of radical design 

- expression / creativity / injection of color emotion

- bold / bright / vibrant colours 

- exotic laminates 

- veneers 

- wild patterns / geometric shapes 

- sense of fun

Memphis 1981 : 

- theories on artistic and intellectual foundations of design

- drawings and designs in bold colors with futuristic shapes decorative styles of past years 

- create controversy with their objects and openly criticize what was considered good design.

- Anti design

- product achieved much fame and caused much criticism

Roy Lichtenstein

Born in New York in 1923. He started to be famous for his bold, Pop Art paintings of comic strip cartoons and everyday objects:

he was best known as a painter, he use to work in a variety of media: sculpture, murals, prints and ceramics.

Lichtenstein chose colors carefully, to imitate the four colors of printers’ inks. He also used Ben Day dots, a system invented to increase the range of colors available to newspaper printing.If we look for his work from a distance we can see how clear the color are , but they look like many tiny dots in the close-up.

Lichtenstein is famous for his use of cartoon strips from American comic books, which had a wide readership in the 1950s. He admired the skill of the comic book artist, who could create complex stories of love and war in cartoon form.

Lichtenstein was sometimes accused of copying comics exactly, but he stressed that he made changes to them  right down to the tiniest placement of individual dots. He was also criticized for using very basic painting techniques. 

Crazy anti-design

Mostly, people associate their homes, their living space with something private, personal, something that should bring you calmness and relaxation, because home is the place, where you spend most of your time, so you must be absolutely comfortable in there. 

Actually, craziness of Italian designers of 60’s is talking about our living spaces in absolutely different way. They were fighting with the perfect geometry of modernism, showing provocative avant-garde ideas for a living space, not calm and relaxed ones, which people are used to, but new, crazy and extremely unusual. They did not want to think about good design, they went against it. Here on pictures you can see some furniture objects by Superstudio and Archizoom Associati. All of these objects are really strange from the first sight. Even the colours and materials give really crazy outlook, which does not gives comfortable, cozy atmosphere to these pieces. 

Tastes differ, but as for me, I do not feel none of this objects to be useful. Take a look at the lamp «Gherpe», designed by Superstudio, on the picture 1. It looks quite pretty, it is done in the shape of the Nautilus shell, but I do not feel that this red plastic around it will give a nice light to the home atmosphere, it will be a bit disturbing to have this supportive red light all the time. Maybe it could be nice for a party, or for special evenings, but for everyday life this kind of light could be really disturbing. 

Picture 1. Lamp «Gherpe»,by Superstudio

Also, if you take a look at the sofa «Superonda», on picture 2, designed by Archizoom Associati, you maybe will not understand that it is a sofa from the first sight, because it looks a bit curvy, with strict edges and it seems that it is done of plastic, because of its glossy look, which is absolutely not cozy material for the living space. In fact it is done not out of plastic, it is soft. Moreover, this sofa is modular, you can have many pieces of it, connected and you can create different layers and sizes of sofas. This is a good thing, which I like about this sofa, because when you have small apartment, but you have many people coming over, you can keep pieces of sofa in the wardrobe, or somewhere else, and just take them away in the right moment and model by yourself a perfect sofa for special occasion. So it is like you are the one who decides, how your space will look like, you have freedom to change your space. I like the fact that space adjusts to you, not you to the space. 

Picture 2. Sofa «Superonda», by Archizoom Associati

If you take a look at the picture 3, you can see the armchair «Joe», which is designed by D’Urbino, De Pas and Lomazzi, in the shape of big baseball glove. This armchair looks really massive and in my opinion not comfortable at all, but it is nice play of scale, it is quite interesting how big could be this small object, and actually, by making it so big, they gave it much more importance, than it actually has, being in its usual scale. Probably, the designers wanted just to confront the established forms, shapes and traditional norms in order to create a masterpiece, which will be absolutely new, different and not under the common rules.

 Picture 3. Armchair «Joe», by D’Urbino, De Pas and Lomazzi

Overall, of course it depends on taste, whether you like these Radical furniture pieces, or not, but in my opinion they are made more with the idea of decor, rather than a design, because design is something more than just a random flow of creative ideas, it is absolutely thoughtful decisions, something which makes peoples life better and easier’s, design must be practical and beautiful at the same time, but really important is that design must work for human, not just being near the human to create a nice atmosphere.

Ettore Sottsass

« Make Design, is not giving a shape to a more or less stupid product for an industry more or less luxurious. For me design is a way to debate about life"

Ettore Sottsass

Sottsass as we all know was anti-capitalist, ironic and utopian, and this is why he became part of the anti-design movement of his generation. 

He went beyond the style issue of seduction to make people consume more. Therefore, he wanted to have an impact on the artificial world that was surrounding him.

Thanks to his convictions and ideas he created various pieces such as "Pilastro" exposed in 1969  in the National Museum of Stockholm for the exhibition "Miljo for en my planet" Landscape for a new planet. 

This unique ceramic piece is striking by its dimensions (2 meters tall) and  its design. 

But to me what is standing out the most is the name he gave to the piece, "Pilaster installed at the border of the non violent country". 

This name shows how much he cared about the society and the world. How his design was not meant to be sold or for consumption but to discuss and denounce social situations. 

Furthermore, as I said before, this piece was striking for its dimension and design. Thus, the two meters were not shaped or formed by a unique piece, however, by hundreds and thousands of ceramic disks layed over each other. Through this method, I believe that he wanted to create this effect of unity. He showed to people how everyone could get together and be in peace. All those disks were not in reality disks but humans, societies that were meant to be in peace with each other. Moreover, I think that Sottsass made his piece vertical because he believed that people could rise their souls to heaven. The new planet he wanted to give to the museum of Stokholm was a planet of peace between people, societies and earth. 

Finally, I am certain and I believe that this kind of design considered as "crazy design" is more a striking and true design than most of the others. Of course, many people would consider design for museum as Art, however, I think and I believe that those people are creating new societies. 

Léa Blanchard

Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "Less is more" to describe his aesthetic tactic of arranging the necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity, functionality and minimalism. That approach related to the modernism movement.

In contrast to that vision, Architect Robert Venturi came up with his motto "Less is a bore", he criticized the modernism characteristic and suggest a new approach of Complex architecture.

It seems to me, that Robert Venturi felt that the idea of less is more is not suitable for people. People needed to be captured by the imagination that the post modernism was offering. Calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. With the new technology it seemed that anything is possible, even the wildest and the complex.

His book "Learning from Las Vegas", is facing the Symbols of the visual, commercial and shiny architecture that concentrated in the city of gambling and entertainment in Las Vegas.

He presents the city as an expression of culture that can't be ignored and that you can learn from it.

In my opinion, Les Vegas represents the commercial message.

The gambling hall is always dark and has no windows. The perception of time and space of the guests distorted, there is no sense of time and space disappear. Time has no limits because there is no difference between day and night.

The modernism approach of "Less is more" describes minimalism, while the new approach of "Less is a bore" describes freedom of imagination. The example of Las Vegas, shows that the people has the possibility for imagination but they are not aware of the fact that they are being controlled.