And I'd said at the beginning of this lecture that Italy was different from Scandinavia in that it was more urban, and more focused on a kind of dialogue amongst architects and designers and artists. And, in order for that dialogue to take place, ideas as well as drawings and photographs of architecture and theories needed a place to be shown or shared and Domus was the perfect receptacle for that. Gio Ponti was the founder of the magazine and then goes on to be the editor of the magazine, twice, during his career and in many ways he's seen as kind of the grandfather of modern design in Italy. And Italian design is interesting in that the way that many furniture designers and interior designers, as well as architects, come to the world of design is through an education that's actually focused on architecture first. And then through their education they start to specialize, and eventually some of, some practitioners, actually, never do build buildings; many focus just on interiors and furniture, but they all have this in common, this kind of focus on, on building. What the magazine actually offers is a kind of core around the building arts, with an exploration both of things that actually were built and of things that were purely theoretical. Gio Ponti had a long and prolific career. Amongst his kind of iconic designs is the Superleggera. This is a chair that, actually, is based on a vernacular form that one might see in a café or in a village square in Italy, but, in fact, in Gio Ponti's hands becomes a sculptural object. He refines it down to almost kind of minimal elements and works with a manufacturer to make this chair extraordinarily light. And you can see in the advertising that the image selling this chair was a little boy picking it up with just his pinky. This idea of looking at the vernacular and modernizing it, is just one of the ways of approaching modern design. He's also responsible for some pretty extraordinary buildings. This building here is built in Caracas, Venezuela in about 1956. This is Villa Plancha. This is a building that comes about because the family who, who commissions it is actually an art collecting couple who were very interested in modern art in South and Central America; and, through connections in Italy, are kind of brought over to Italy to look at art there, and also, specifically, to meet Gio Ponti. They're impressed with his ability and they asked him to build them a house that will actually be, not only a home, but a place for them to display their collection. The building, itself, is actually quite sculptural. You can see even just in the awning that comes out over the carport, how he's not just using a slab of poured concrete but he's created this sculptural form that reaches out over the cars. And that the façade of the building is a wee bit canted so we see kind of an angle there and you can see it in the roofline. The sculptural quality becomes even more obvious at night when the building is fully lit. The light coming from between the roof and the walls makes the roof look as if it's just going to float away and it's almost as if you could just peel away the whole façade. Look at the way that the light kind of pours out from the bottom portion of the façade as well. It really looks as if it's a separate kind of covering that's wrapping the house, playing with some of those ideas in modernist architecture of creating a kind of volume that has the sort of skin stretched around it, expressing the fact that the building is actually being held up with metal and reinforced concrete piers or pillars as opposed to solid masonry walls. The other thing to take note of is the window placement. He's placing the windows and leaving them undressed. They don't have any curtains; in a sense, creating show windows where one could, if they could kind of float in front of the house, view the artwork from the outside. The windows are placed in a way that reflects the use of the room on the interior but also has a kind of graphic quality to it. On the inside, he uses architectural devices to continue this kind of play with the volume of the spaces as well as using mural color to create interest. So when we're taking a look, for instance, at this room, we see lighting that's recessed in such a way as to create a sense that the walls and the ceiling are made up of separable panels and you can see the light coming from the join between the wall and the ceiling and also behind one of the panels in the ceiling. Also notice that the windows are in unusual places, the main picture window is placed in a kind of a spot that we would expect it to be in but some of the other windows are very high up bringing light in at different angles in the space, angles that would be unexpected. The floor is laid at a diagonal, kind of throwing one off a little bit, and the pictures are hung in an unusual way. And look at the one picture above the picture window; almost surreal and, in fact, surrealism is informing a lot of interior design in Italy, and also in France at this time, in the late '40s and the early '50s. The chairs that he uses in this space are revised versions of the Superleggera, again playing with a kind of sculptural form that's made up almost of the thinnest lines possible of wood. Moving into the entryway, the staircase itself becomes a sculptural form; the whole handrail is shaped based on some ideas that come from cubism, as is the upholstered chair that's in the lower right hand corner of the image. If we follow through to the space that's under the kind of mezzanine level there, you can see there's a diagonal stripe on the ceiling and this is what that interior looks like. Again, very surreal; he's, he's really playing with the idea of the "huntsman's" room and you think about like the trophies on the wall and the animal carpet on the floor and even the pieces of furniture have a rather animal kind of quality to them; they've, they look as if they might just get up and walk away. Take note of the panels on the back wall; when closed they look like a simple graphic arrangement on top of the wood paneling, maybe just a framed picture, but when they're turned around they have this peculiar backlit quality and the animal heads become almost silhouetted against the, the intense light, really, again, playing with these ideas of surrealism. And he actually works with Fornasetti. Now, Fornasetti really does bridge the surrealist art world with the applied arts, or furniture design and home design, and he is really known for applying these kind of very graphic, generally black and white, sometimes colored, but really often black and white images to surfaces in a very unexpected way. And so here he's working together with the Gio Ponte, Gio Ponti is responsible for that wonderful sculptural design of the headboard with the side tables actually built in and the very kind of boxy quality of the wardrobe; and then what Fornasetti has done, is he's applied these graphic images in a way that looks as if they're almost random over the surface of the headboard and then onto the bedspread as well, creating a sense of continuous surface; where does the wood end and where does the textile begin? He plays with this idea of surface in a series of wallpaper, that he does; where the wallpaper is actually bookshelves and you take a look at this, it's almost, it's almost trompe l'oeil, it's almost trying to fool your eye but he, he really never creates graphics that are, that are that photorealistic. He's either using black and white or, when he uses color, he uses very kind of solid colors, they're almost cartoonish, so he's not trying to make us think that that wall has books on it, he's actually playing with the idea of the library. And if you take notice of the scale of things that are in there, he's got the symbol of music and science, they're placed on shelves, we've got a musical instrument down at the bottom there; but the chair is too small, the instrument is too large for the scale of the chair, and this is kind of seen throughout. And, of course, what he's playing with, at least in part, is the idea of the studiolo; a long tradition in, in Italian interiors and here he's creating a sort of contemporary idea of the studiolo, and here we have an example of Fornasetti working in color and again you're not, you're not going to be fooled, this isn't trompe l'oeil, he wants you to realize that this is fake, he wants you to think about what it is, and like surrealist painters he's not suggesting that this is reality, he's actually expressing a sort of dual reality; a place that we know isn't real. Here, again, in this corner cupboard, he's taken the corner cupboard and turned it into a piece of architecture. Do we think it actually is a building? No. But is the play between the piece of architecture and this classical building kind of pleasurable? In many cases yes, he's, he's kind of dematerializing the surface of it, changing our perception of it. And this is seen as well in this Fiat automobile, again, a modern designer playing with the design of the car and the car being such an integral part of the way that modern design sees itself from Corbusier on. Now Carlo Mollino is an entirely different kind of designer; although he also really enjoys the surrealist bent. Mollino is extremely experimental but also a really multifaceted person, he was a racecar driver, he flew airplanes, but he also designed cars and designed airplane parts. He was an accomplished photographer, and also took lots of a very kind of personal portrait photographs of very lovely young women. He designed furniture, and he also designed interiors. And his success really came through a kind of extreme personalization in his designs, taking elements of his rather extraordinary life and the lens through which he saw things and really expressing that quite fully in his designs. Here what we've got are these two armchairs that talk about the jetsetter life. They talk about being able to get on an airplane and fly, which was quite extraordinary; this wasn't something that everyone could do. And so we've got these, you know, truly first-class airplane seats now upholstered in red velvet on gold bases elevating them even more and still having all of the kind of streamlined quality that we think about with vehicles that go quickly, speed, and kind of the excitement of that type of lifestyle. What he's been most famous for, in recent years, are his table or desk designs in part because they've brought extraordinary prices at auction, up into the multi-millions. He just didn't do an awful lot of designs and his work is so particular and unique that collectors have found it very appealing. In taking a look at these two table designs and the sketches that are included in this book cover, think about how this relates to Antonio Gaudi and his close relationship with the structure of the human body and the bones of animals. Clearly Mollino is inspired by this and a lot of Mollino's work kind of meld some of the ideas from the Art Nouveau, specifically Antonio Gaudi, and ideas about future, future visions of the world, surrealism, modern thought, it's really a wonderful and exciting melting pot. He uses very modern methods, so, for instance, in the table in the lower left, we can see bent plywood as the base and then these very thick sheets of plate glass. The piece on the top has an almost animal quality to it, much like Gaudi, a kind of spine runs the length of the table. Here, in one of his interiors, we see yet another chair design, this one even more, more like a little animal with its ears at the top and its legs kind of perched ready to move forward. But just looking around the room we can see a number of elements that relate to his fascination with surrealism. Look at the walls, they're, they're floor-to-ceiling curtains yet there are paintings hung in front of them. Is there glass behind there? What's holding the paintings up? Are they supposed to be floating on the curtain? Once the curtains drawn away how do the paintings then relate to the window behind them, if there is one? Look at the placement of the fireplace, how it seems to become actually part of the artwork as opposed to a part of the architecture. It's not placed in the typical position, it's not hitting the floor. Here it's raised up high enough to become sort of central to our sight line, especially if we were sitting. He includes one of these bent wood tables over to the far left and above that built-in banquette we see a black-and-white photograph of water falling down a mountain. Now this probably doesn't seem so extraordinary to us today because we've seen lots of examples of photographs being blown up and installed wall-sized in interiors, especially during the '70s, but in the '40s and '50s this was really extraordinary and this is the first time that somebody's done that and it's his own photograph as well; so you go out and take photographs and then enlarge them and incorporate them into his space. The idea of water flowing into the interior of this room, maybe tumbling over that sofa, is quite surreal. And we see this interest and playful design and sort of a surreal quality to design and a desire to sort of turn things upside down on, on its head in design in Italy, consistently. We can see that with the Castiglioni brothers and their lighting designs here and a stool design all coming from the very early '60s. They work together, both as architects and as design engineers, and we can see a kind of desire to bring in industrial elements to the domestic interior both in their lighting and in their furniture design. Taking a closer look at this torch, torchiere lamp, what we're actually seeing in the Toio design is a car headlight. And the car headlight is perched on top of a kind of metal loop, it then comes down a pole that actually has fishing pole rings on it to keep the wire stable, and then the excess wire wraps around a little element there, and then it comes down to a transformer, and the weight of the transformer actually balances this object so that it doesn't fall over. All very unexpected, very kind of raw and industrial in quality and yet extremely functional. And we see that in some ways, as well, with this stool that's made of a tractor seat, in line with what Corbusier talks about; the idea that if something's already designed well, it's completely functional, why would you then design again? Just use that. They've taken the purely functional tractor seat and attached it to this rather elegant cantilevered stool base to create a piece of furniture that's both comfortable and practical, but also has an element of humor and an element of the unexpected. Probably one of their best-known designs and certainly an extraordinarily elegant lamp, is the Arco. And this this lamp combines the simplicity of the large chromed bowl where the where the light is housed with this perfectly arcing arm that actually retracts, so you can actually lift the lamp higher or bring it down lower, and the whole thing stays completely balanced. That's, in part, due to the fact that the base is made of a solid chunk of marble. Well after the brothers had designed the lamp, they realized that it had an issue. Once this was delivered to somebody's home, they'd sort of be stuck with it in one place because it would be so awfully difficult to move around the house. So they continued working on the design and decided to drill a hole through the marble, in just the perfect position and just the right size, to stick a broomstick through; figuring that everybody's got a broomstick in their house and with one person on either end of the broomstick the lamp can be picked up and moved around the room and because it's placed in just the right position, the lamp doesn't swing; it doesn't it doesn't go off balance when it's lifted. Something else I want you to think about when you're looking at this image is an approach to design, an approach to modernism, that's a little bit different than what we encounter in the United States. This is this is actually Achille Castiglioni and this is an advertising photograph, but it's an interior that was part of the Castiglionis' daily lives. It's not a modern space at all, it's actually a very old space, and if we think about European cities, and certainly Italy is a great example, there's lots of architecture already built. In fact when one wants to build something new it's pretty hard to find a building site; you can't rip down a fantastic Renaissance building or even a fantastic 19th century building just to put up something new, unless there's really an issue. So you're dealing with a lot of already built environment and much of it not just preserved by powers-that-be but highly respected by the communities and the culture that used these cities. So when designing something modern, one takes into account the fact that the envelope may very often be old. And so we see Castiglioni sitting in a space with extremely modern pieces of furniture, including this molded plastic stool or side table and his Arco lamp design, but he's surrounded by these older elements and both are actually living together in a very comfortable way. We can see it as well with some of the designs of Joe Colombo. So here's Joe Colombo, a man who has an unfortunately short career, he dies quite early, but whose short time committed to design is, actually, it's really very experimental and he brings us designs in the late .60s and early '70s that really change a lot of ideas about design. He inherited a wire manufacturing company from his father and it was actually, they, they made the plastic insulation on the exterior of the wire and so his interest in engineering and plastics was already just a part of his life, but what he really wanted to do was to be a designer. And when he finally has the opportunity to do that, he really combined some of his understanding of plastics with his design work, so all three of the designs that we're looking at here have plastic as a structural element. The armchair that he's sitting in that has this very luxurious leather upholstery and then these two other designs that are a little bit more utilitarian; the cart at the top right-hand corner is a, is a cart that was actually designed to be a multi-purpose and highly functional. Now if you were going to school for to study interior design or architecture in the '70s or the '80s this plastic cart would have been something that you would have either had or coveted, because it's extremely functional. It's got these kind of swing out drawer elements that allow you to place all kinds of things, like your Rapidograph pens and all those pencils you would have needed at easy access; and then open shelving; it's got wheels to roll around the room, and it's even got, at the back, places where you could have put rolls of tracing paper. But he creates carts that are even less specific as well that were very often included in the designs of living rooms. A little red cart, for instance, makes a perfect, functional end table and the tube chair is actually made of a series of plastic tubes that fit concentrically inside each other; so if you'd ordered this chair you would have actually received just this big tube and then you would have unpacked it by sliding out the tubes. It included instructions on how to put it together, but you were of course invited to build it anyway you wanted; and then it comes with clips that allow you to clip the the big tubes together. Now part of this has to do with a real big change in society, a desire to be interactive with your furniture is something quite new. You are now invited to be participating in the way that your furniture looks, you're expected to be moving things around. They've got wheels on the bottom or they come packed up and your, your going to assemble it any way you like, and also you're invited to sit in unusual ways, very much like Verner Panton's environments, Colombo is also responding to shifts in society; a younger market, a more kind of transient youth market where people are thinking about packing up their furniture and rolling it away, taking it off to another location. We can also see that connection to pop culture with the types of really poppy colors that we've got; brilliant reds, pure whites, chromed, chromed metals, all kind of mixing together. And Joe Columbo really enjoyed good science-fiction and he definitely is designing with some of that in mind. One of his most extraordinary designs is this total furnishing unit. And he explores the idea of creating units for living throughout the last few years of his career. So here what we've got is the total furnishing unit assembled, in one of a variety of ways, this is the way that it was most often displayed. It's made up of a number of individual parts; at one end we've got a kitchen and at the other end, a bathroom unit, and you can see in the isometric here that they have vent, ventilation and service tubes that come out of the top so you would kind of hook this up to some kind of vent and you would have the ability to bring in water and electricity. But aside from that, this unit doesn't actually have to have any interaction with the enclosing walls of the space in which it's placed. Everything that a couple would need is provided for; in the central unit we've got beds that slide out from underneath, we've got an entertainment area with a television you can see the table drawn and two chairs pulled up, and then behind those orange doors there are areas for private study and quiet work. Taking a look at the kitchen you can see it's got all the modern conveniences, just in a really tiny scale and when you were done you could close up that space with vertical blinds. Coming around to the front of the unit, you pull out a door and what you end up with is a full scale closet, and then you can see one of the beds pulled out and there's just a little peek there into one of those tiny little spaces for alone time or study. Joe Colombo also explores this idea of furnishing units as kind of pods, as elements that one could put in or take out individually, and they're purpose-designed. And so here in Visiona, an exhibition of these, these kinds of ideas, exploring these kinds of ideas, we can see in the center of the room was an entertainment pod that includes a television set and square kind of daybed cum sofa with storage beneath and storage above; a kind of unit for relaxing. Then off to one side, we've got the dining area with molded plastic stacking chairs designed by Columbo, and then this large like globe-looking object is actually the back end of a bathroom that was completely enclosed and meant to look as if it was a great big piece of molded plastic although it definitely was not. He actually lives this way as well, and he designs an apartment for himself that includes his design of a cabriolet bed, and that's the larger image that we're looking at; it has a retractable hood so that during the day the bed could be completely closed off, the bed is on casters so that it can move around the room, it has electrical elements in it that come through a series of wires that are encased in sort of service tubes that run around the ceiling of the space, and at the back of it it has a wardrobe and dressing area; so all of it is sort of self-contained, as the sleeping/dressing unit, much like Mies and Lilly Reich in the Villa Tugendhat we see these kind of tracks on the ceiling that allow for privacy by drawing curtains, but in the case of Colombo they're not actually curtains, they're folded plastic walls that retract or come around and give the sleeping area some privacy. In addition, he's got an eating area that's connected to the kitchen and you can see the sort of semicircular table with the two chairs pulled up to it that flips around and that entire tabletop ends up in the kitchen, which is on the other side of that wall, for service. Now Italy, especially northern Italy in the area not that far from Milan, provided a very unusual kind of hot house for design and it's because of the types of factories that they had in that region. Italian manufacturing before the Second World War was done in small family-owned companies and especially in that northern region of Italy there was a tradition of very fine, excellent production in individual companies that were family operated. Through the course of the war there's a lot more technology that comes in; after the war things change pretty greatly because of the Marshall Plan and there's a lot of money coming in from the United States to build up factories. And some of these companies are able to really bring in very modern equipment. They've got what they, they've got what they developed through the war and in America and Italy in all the countries that participated in the war there was a great deal of technological advance that went on, for the purpose of fighting. After the war, these companies have these new, new abilities but there are no peacetime designs available. The Marshall Plan pours money into Italy and there's a possibility of doing very expensive production but, again, they need designs. These small companies open their doors to experimental designers and because they've got really cutting-edge technology and a willingness to work with people where they may not be doing a great big run, the company is small they're able to do that, they start to develop very innovative designs and, to this day, it's a great place for avant-garde designers to work hand-in-hand with companies that sometimes have some of the most cutting-edge technology or do extremely high-end luxury production in small runs. Once in a while these things even end up becoming real mass-produced designs. Now we see that definitely with Kartell. Kartell is a plastics company and they developed a very hard ABS plastic that you can inject with a lot of color, so you have this really saturated plastics with great brilliant color, they're durable, the color doesn't fade and they're so strong that they can be used for furniture manufacturing. And that's, that's where we see people like Joe Colombo being able to utilize them for these very creative purposes. We also see this with Anna Castelli Ferrieri who's probably best known for her stacking storage designs, but also through the '90s, still designing really experimental things like this table that has a drop leaf that's actually a quarter of the table dropping down so that it can actually be pushed up against an an inside corner in a room, a very creative idea. We see in the stacking, the stacking storage units a real playfulness and, again, it's that ABS plastic, it's the fact that a company would actually work with a designer who was doing experimental designs, that's really particular to Italy. Now it just doesn't, it can't happen in America and it was one of the things that was very frustrating for Mid-century designers in America was that the factories that had the technology were so large that they really wanted products that would be designed and sold in a very large run and those working in Italy, in a sense, had an upper hand. Another experimental designer from the '60s and '70s, who actually continued to be extremely experimental right up to the end of his life, is Gaetano Pesce. Now Pesce designed sort of surrealist inspired designs and we can see him playing with scale, but his playfulness almost has no real description. I mean it's, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to kind of pin him down in one style or one movement. The image that we're looking at on the right hand side of the screen is a photograph of a recreation of an exhibition that took place in 1972 at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. The name of the exhibition was "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" and what was on exhibition were a lot these kind of cutting-edge experimental design some of which we've looked at, like, for instance, a good deal of Joe Colombo's work, including that total furnishing unit, and in some of Gaetano Pesce's work as well. Now in the foreground there's a drafting table lamp, but this drafting table lamp is, I don't know, 10, 12, 14, feet tall; completely blown out of scale. Behind it we can see some of Joe Colombo's designs for plastic molded chairs and then some images on the wall that relate to contemporary Italian poster art. So this was an exhibition that had a really broad variety of different types of mediums. It was one that really, in many ways, changed American design as well because of its influence and we see a lot of molded plastic furniture coming into American interiors after 1972. Another one of his designs, this from 1968, again explores ideas of scale, of form and, in this case, also makes a rather strong social statement. One of Pesce's favorite things was to play with new materials and to think about the properties of new materials in very, very different ways. So this, this chair actually begins its life completely flat. The form of the chair is very closely related to the female figure, so we see this reclining nude connected to this big ball and it refers to the, to the sort of subjugation of women or the or the heavy burden that women have had to carry in society, but the chair itself is actually much more playful than that. And what we're looking at here are some of the advertising images for the chair. It arrived to the purchaser flat packed, all the air had been pulled out of the foam, you would unpeel the plastic, open it up, and then let the foam reform and take on the air and blow itself back up; that's why it's called the Up chair because it actually was a chair that moved up once you purchased it. He plays with some post modernist ideas in the 1980s and here we have Sunrise Over New York, a sofa that takes on the form of the New York skyline. And here we have two chairs that experiment with, with more modern materials; one of them, the chair on the left, is made out of industrial felt. Now industrial felt is really thick, like over an inch thick, and it has the property of being very easily molded; so the upper portion of the chair is entirely flexible and you can take the the sides and back of the chair and fold them down like like a collar or you can lift them up and actually wrap yourself inside the upholstered, the upholstered interior and create like a kind of cocoon. The chair on the right, called the Pratt chair, is a chair that's made out of a kind of liquid plastic and what Pesce a would do is pour the plastic on to stainless steel sheets that had been laid down on the floor and play with it until it started to harden and then form it into these chair forms, so every one of them is entirely unique. Now, as I said earlier, there's a lot of thought that goes on sort of behind the scenes an Italian design, a lot of discourse, a lot of dialogue, between designers and architects and architectural and design critics. When we get to the 1960s what we see is a kind of radical movement that starts to build up that, ultimately, become something that's called "anti-design". It's a fight against the principles of modernism and the sort of pure doctrines of modernism; a desire to open up thought in new ways in design and also to relate or to respond to the problems or the questions of contemporary life. And, since there is this movement of focus to kind of the younger generation, by the time we get to the late '60s we see across Europe, and also in the United States, not only political movements that are headed by young people but we also see a lot of design movements that are headed by them. And with the work of Superstudio, we really see a group of artists coming together into a collective to create design and to create dialogue that responds to some of these ideas. Now this idea of the collective, a group of artists, architects, designers coming together for the purpose of creating design within the collective, is really popular and quite central to a lot of the most avant-garde design that comes out of Italy as well as other parts of Europe in the late '60s and early '70s. Superstudio explores the idea of a world that's connected by these kinds of bridges that are covered with a regular graph and they create quite a number of images, some of them quite startling, that express a world that's almost partly destroyed by this modern sort of graph bridge. They're connecting world monuments together and ignoring elements of preservation; depicting a world that seems to be almost destroyed by, by war or some kind of horrific catastrophe. They don't build all that much connected to this idea; we see this, for instance, this one small structure here but really most of this is expressed through graphics. And you can see on the left side of the screen another one of these graphics here depicting the graph going on in what seems like an endless space with a family sort of set up with completely mundane chores in the center of the image; and part of what they're picturing is this kind of graph that one could walk on and if you just continue to walk on it you would eventually hit one city after another and along the way you would have these sort of stations where life would take place. They did design some furniture as well and you can see that on the right-hand side of the screen based on this graph idea. Another one of these experimental design studios was Studio Alchimia and Studio Alchimia played with a relationship between other modernist movements, or earlier modernist movements, and contemporary design. And we can see quite directly how Mendini is playing with the designs of, for instance, Marcel Breuer with this kind of rethinking of the Wassily chair. And then with the ideas of pointillism, in this armchair, that kind of combines nineteenth-century historicism with pointillist painting in a very contemporary way. Another Italian design collective or association is Archizoom and what we're looking at here are two images from installations that were part of their No-Stop City designs. And these, these relate also to what Superstudio was doing; this idea of mega-cities, kind of endless cities. In this case what they envisioned was in entirely interior cities and so you can see these are the interiors of large buildings and the idea was that there would be this endless city with electric lighting and air conditioning that would just go on forever, and all manner of things would take place in these broad open spaces; very kind of interesting idea about exploring the contemporary world. Here what we're looking at are some of the designs that come out of their explorations. So, with most of these collectives, what you find is that there's the the portion of their work that's really theoretical and is, is about exploring ideas that very often will never go beyond a gallery installation or photographic montages; and then there are also those things which are produced, either as architecture or interiors or individual pieces of furniture. And what we've got is this kind of seating unit that's called the Safari sofa and you can see it's actually upholstered in a leopard print. It's kind of playing with the ideas of modern interaction and creating kind of conversation pit and then on the left-hand side we've got the Torso chair. And the Torso chair is exploring the idea of human form; of course we get that just by the name, but it's also playing with imagery from the 1950s. And if you think about, for instance, automobile design, like the interiors of cars or diners, and the use of kind of plastic, plasticized kind of leather or, or actually leather that's, that's been colored in these kind of brilliant colors, that's part of what it is that they're playing with because they're bringing this idea of kitsch, or what was not considered high design, into the world of "anti-design" kind of going against it in some way. And then here this is called the Mies chair, clearly a direct reference to early modernist designs in the work of Mies van Der Rohe and maybe we can think back to, for instance, the Bruno chair or the chairs that were designed for the Barcelona pavilion. Here we've got the flat steel just like Mies used but in a perfect triangle, and then, in fact, the place where a person would sit is actually a rubber sling. So they kind of sit into this thing and the rubber supports them and then there's this little footstool that's connected to it again upholstered in that kind of safari print, that leopard print fabric. So playing with modernism, taking another look at it, and creating something that sort of denies some of what was going on and yet accepts other elements of it, so it's really, extremely, avant-garde. One of these design collectives that's formed in the '70s actually has an effect on post-modernism. And, and a number of these collectives continue to work into the 1980s. Ettore Sottsass was, on his own, a great designer and an industrial designer with, with great success and we see here, for instance, one of his award-winning designs for Olivetti. He does a series of typewriters for them, this is probably one of the most innovative of the designs. This was the Valentin typewriter and not only is it encased in this brilliant red plastic, making it a really kind of luscious object, but it also slips into this carrying case, that you can see turned upside down in back of it, and snaps into it in such a way that the typewriter itself isn't in danger of getting destroyed while you're carrying it around. Now for us today the idea of taking a typewriter from here to there is probably not very thrilling because we have laptops, but in its day this was sort of like an Apple computer or something, this was a high-end design, like high-end design, really exciting, very much appealing to the youth market and made mobile something that had previously been only for use in the office. The design collective that he establishes is called Memphis. And Memphis like, like those other design collectives, is really formed in order for a group of like-minded people to explore some of the things that they have in common in their design sensitivities. And what we see here is this, this, first of all, this is the collective; there they are on this kind of seating unit/conversation pit/tatami mat/wrestling ring but it has references to all kinds of things besides the distinctly Japanese reference with it's tatami mats. If we look at, for instance, the integrated lighting fixtures, they look an awful lot like the lamps that are designed at the Bauhaus. If we look, for instance, at the bold colors that are being used we can kind of bring that back to the color palette of the 1950's and then that really strong old use of black and white brings us to a lot of the early modernism so there are a lot of different things going on here. Now the collective was formed mostly from Italian architects and designers, there was one Japanese architect who's responsible for this design, and then one American, Michael Graves, who goes on to make a career as a post-modernist architect back in the United States. This is a kind of nice overview of a whole exploration that they do of early modernism, kind of re-addressing modernism as we saw in the Bauhaus, where things were very, very functional and there was this exploration of basic forms and the primary colors. What happens when it's in the hands of the Memphis group is that it becomes maybe a little less functional and a little more about exploring color and form and certainly much more playful. So we see designs that are roughly based on what we saw at the Bauhaus; for instance, if we look at this living room we've got a carpet on the floor that could, almost, look like something that came out of the Bauhaus weaving workshops, a chair in the foreground that looks very much like one of the tubular steel chairs that was designed at the Bauhaus but everything is just more playful. And there's a kind of irreverence and it's that irreverence that really sets, sets their designs apart. No longer is it just about function. And here we see Lucchi's chair and this is, he calls this, First chair because it goes back to the idea of the tubular steel chair design coming first out of the Bauhaus. And here we see two bookcases that are designed by Sottsass and he's responsible for quite a number of designs that come out of the Memphis group. Bold colors relating to both the kind of palette that was preferred in those modernist movements, you can even think of De Stijl, but here some of the pattern and some of the coloring is also coming from the '50s and the '60s from materials like Formica, vinyl floor coverings and wallpapers that had these kind of stippled patterns on them, and then these very playful kind of irreverent forms, things are not necessarily functional, the angles and the, the sizes of things are not meant just to be useful but to be graphically pleasing. And then he's even incorporated, if you look on the image on the right, there's a kind of figure there at the top if you make it out, he's got a little square head and his arms are up in the air. That comes directly from time that Sottsass spent in India and he saw this symbol on Indian, on Indian work and he decided to incorporate it in his own work. So you can see that he's also drawing from different cultures. This, this is actually much later, also by Sottsass, but you can see how he continues to explore those ideas that he was exploring in the late, late '70s and early '80s, the idea of what could be purely functional, being not purely functional; creating pieces that kind of bridge that space between art and functional objects.