Experimentation Through/With/Against the Past: The Role of Craft in Italian Design
The 1960s represent a moment of transition in post-war Italian design. The earlier part of the decade was defined by its dominance in the international design marketplace, thanks to the desirable luxuries conceived by architects such as Gio Ponti and Vico Magistretti who were able to turn their modernizing, glamorizing hand to everything from the vernacular materials of Italy’s historic craft traditions to the newer realm of plastics.
The progressing decade saw a critical voice emerge amongst designers concerned at design’s market orientation. This was evident in the Radical Design movement whose designs ironically embraced kitsch and bad taste. Radical Design’s anti-modernist stance would become more transgressive and less-object based in the early 1970s before the advent of full-blown postmodernism with Studio Alchymia and Memphis by the 1980s.
Although well known in their own right, the links between these sixties and eighties in Italian design has received little critical examination. An interdisciplinary approach could provide the way to examine this; architects such as Ettore Sottsass, central figure to both Radical Design and Italian postmodernism, expressed their critical position through a conscious engagement with a discipline close to, but distinct from, design; craft, a realm with its own distinct, but largely unwritten, history. This is a realm described by the craft historian Glenn Adamson as a “horizon” or a “conceptual limit” in artistic modernity, I argue that it occupies the same position in relation to design.[1]
There are three main ways that design could be seen to have productively played at this border with craft – first, through craft; the turn to artisanal makers for the physical realization of ideas, as in Sottsass reliance on the artisans behind the production of his Superboxes for Poltronova. Designed in 1966, the Superboxes Pop art references expressed his rejection of Italian design’s elitism and attempt to connect with contemporary consumer culture.
Second, with craft; the embrace of historic Italian craft traditions such as ceramics and enamelware for surface experimentation and the exploration of alternative values in our relationship with material culture by way of craft concepts such as the vernacular. This is seen in Sottsass’ Ceramiche delle Tenebre and Ceramiche di Shiva, made in the early 1960s in response to the architects’ illness and which spoke of his travels to both North America and India in this period.
Third, against craft; the active and visible negation of craft concepts – such as luxury and workmanship.  This was evident in the use of plastic laminates in objects such as the Superboxes, a material that would become the mainstay of Memphis designs such as Sottsass’ Casablanca sideboard from 1981, and a casual approach that informed Sottsass’ enthusiasm for the particular workmanship of Renzo Brugola, the furniture maker who would oversee the production of Memphis objects.
As this brief summary has attempted to demonstrate, examining this interdisciplinary activity has implications for our understanding of Italian design, both in terms of its interdisciplinary and postmodern qualities. Ultimately it shows that interdisciplinarity can be a useful way to think through design practice just as Sottsass actively used another discipline – craft – to think through his own.
References and Further Reading
Adamson, Glenn, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007)
Adamson, Glenn and Jane Pavitt (eds.) Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 (London: V&A Museum, 2011)
Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design, trans. by C.H. Evans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984)
Radice, Barbara, Memphis: Research, Experiences, Results, Failures and Successes of New Design, trans. by Paul Blanchard (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985)
Sparke, Penny, Italian Design 1870 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988)
[1] Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 2.
