A Casa Masaccio in San Giovanni Valdarno, from 25th June to 26th September, an exhibition shows for the first time the phenomenon of Radical design from the '60s to today. The exhibition, curated by Gianni Pettena, is organized by the Municipality of San Giovanni Valdarno, Casa Masaccio Contemporary Art, the Faculty of Architecture University of Florence, in collaboration with the Project of the Tuscany Regional Network of contemporary art, Province Arezzo and Officina.
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On display are over seventy original pieces including tapestries, lamps, sofas, chairs among the multiple meanings of all production. The exhibition is developed chronologically: the Sixties and Seventies, Radical Design and Architecture with works by Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Gaetano Pesce, Superstudio, UFO, Mendini; the eighties with the vitality and the explosion linguistics, the term Alchemy, Memphis and special gallery with works by Sottsass, Branzi, Hollein, Graves, Thun, Zanini, De Lucchi.; Experimental Evolution among the nineties and today with the last generation and continuity test: Ron Arad, Philippe Starck, Ettore Sottsass , Nigel Coates, to the recent proposals of Droog Design, Fratelli Campana.
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Funny, ironic items, where the invention and imagination have no limits, and that made the history of design world. Among the pieces on display of the Proust armchair Mendini, 1978; the Mouth for Edra study 65 of 1971; blown glass vases, Alcor Alioth by Ettore Sottsass 1983 and the Totems of 1964; Cactus by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello for Gufram 1972; the Richard III Chair by Philippe Starck, designed for the wife of French President François Mitterrand; the Poltramaca by Gianni Pettena 1985; up to new generations with overtime 3 Swans by Alessandro Ciffo and the dying swan piece unique for Dilmos, Milano2004; or armchair born here in 2002 by Andrea Salvetti, where the boundaries between art and design disappear.
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The Radical Design was born in Tuscany and expands influencing first Milan and then Europe and finally the whole international scene. Between the sixties and seventies how to make architecture and design changes radically and for the first time not only responding to the criteria of rationality and functionality, but the communication of emotions. The first to do this "revolution" is Ettore Sottsass, is through him that the "radical" discover the potential of the project design. Sottsass with the material, color, decoration is again becoming essential tools of the project, and through them the production of any emotional process. The project can be her story, an allegory of thoughts and desires, it can transcribe through a piece of furniture or object, almost 'live', the flow of any personal becoming.
But it is born in Florence, then what will be called the experience "radical" with Archizoom and Superstudio, UFOs and Pettena (which is characterized, at least initially, the first to pop influences, and the second to the relationship with the ' art "poor", with the conceptual and behavioral) that between 1965 and 1979, producing designs and prototypes in the thoughts and languages ironic, critical and innovative functions, mobile sites and at the same time, real allegories of thought a generation. Other designers will come together later in this adventure: Mendini, Fish, Buti, Strum, Dalisi, Raggi, all interpreters of a climate of experimental full vitality.
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Since 1970 the magazine Casabella in new conduit of Alessandro Mendini, hosts with increasing amplitude experiences and research of the experimenters ' radical ', i.e. investigates a field where the boundary between art and architecture becomes increasingly indistinct, expanding the debate up to the point of loading the design values and existential and social meanings, give it a task of transforming the cultural patterns which architecture not seemed able to support and even to deal with. Radical proposals submitted to the exhibition "Italy: the new domestic landscape" at MoMA in New York in 1972, by the Florentines as Sottsass, fish-like stone or Strum, in Dressing Design of Archizoom as experiences of poor Technical design appears in fact Dalisi in these years as the most appropriate tool designIn addition to reflect on the condition of degradation of modern metropolis, even to intervene to change the quality of life and the environment. By the late 1970s, after years of Casabella and the invention of the magazine, Alessandro Mendini passes to direction of Domus: starting in these years the design of prevailing Italian production, acquires such a richness and complexity that is proactive in mobile from the interiors to be real installationsfrom influence, perhaps for the first time in the entire century, contemporary experiences in the Visual Arts. In the 1980s, Alchemy and particularly the Memphis group, Sottsass and Andrea Branzi (formerly Florentine Archizoom Group founder) operate in the design of a mobile revolution era.
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San Giovanni Valdarno, with the initiative of Casa Masaccio, also celebrates an anniversary, that of Masaccio Prize in 1968, which saw the Town Hall and the entire city to participate in exhibitions, debates and the concomitant event on art films, the peculiar current political and cultural as well as to the origins of the phenomenon of "radical." Leonetto Melani, which made it all possible, he saw his hometown hero, even on national and international press, this process of renewal. And with him in the debates, Corrado Maltese, Dorfles, Lea Vergine, Furio Colombo and Umberto Eco. The exhibition is accompanied by a volume published by the publishing house M & M, Maschietto Editor, Radical Design.
