Designing objectlessness : problems with the negation of objects in the exhibition Italy : The New Domestic Landscape (1972)
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2020
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Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (ITNDL), the exhibition of Italian Radical Design which took place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) was an ambitious and highly ambiguous show. At a time when modernism was already being ostensibly criticised but still before Postmodern movement in architecture, after the riots of May 68 but before 1973’s oil crisis—which would bring postwar welfare estate to an end—the show curated by the Argentinian architect Emilio Ambasz contained a mixture of the vanishing, but still alive, dreams of the past—mainly a belief in the life-improving and emancipating qualities of technology—and seeds of a coming future—the environmentalist movement, for example. Among its inherent contradictions stood out the fact that the exhibition, sponsored by major Italian manufacturers, would design the “death of design.”
By means of technology, space and material, the architects commissioned for the Environments section of ITNDL sought to eliminate the object: to prevent it from existing, from being visible or from having meaningful attachments with its users/inhabitants. Objectlessness, if not the only approach present in the show, was the one through which it became recognized—especially as Superstudio’s Supersurface: A Life Without Objects images became a mandatory architectural canon.
This thesis reviews the Environments section of ITNDL through the lens of the object in order to understand, in the means used for its repression, how an inhabitant is conveyed. The crisis of object-space, object-commodity and object-time which surface from the analysis become relevant to understand contemporary objectlessness—that of the home-screen as a home-surrogate—,and the role of Italian utopias in shaping it, as well as its failures.
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Tesis (Master in Architecture)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2020