MARIAM Y. AL'SAIGH - Italy: the New Domestic Landscape is a catalogue to an exhibition showed at the Museum of Modern Art that explored sociocultural implication of Italian product design. A number of well-known Italian designers had been invited to propose environmental concepts and to translate them physically. Many objects produced not with an historical intention, but rather with the purpose of indicating the different design position evolving in Italy contemporaneously at that time. Subjects include sofas, cupboards, a mobile house, chairs and lamps; all these contemporary objects are followed by illustrated essays on their antecedents.

Two reasons can be observed behind holding such kind of exhibition in a vital city like New York is firstly to provide Italian designers (including architects, planners and critics) the opportunity to review their present situations and troubles which were since 1968 have flared out intermittently. Italy does not give it designers the direct role in the functioning of society. Its policy and program in this sector is concentrated on urgent human problems which need design solutions such as housing for poor, urban renewal and pollution control life. On the other hand the Italian designers were super-fine designers and aware of society’s need. They also made a great success in their products on the international market. Secondly to give the opportunity of studying a comprehensive collection of the work of contemporary Italian designers not only for the American public but to the whole world.

Why Italy? After the Second World War Italy was almost destructed. As the modernism was the dominant movement in the 20th Century which grew out of the technological innovations of the 19th Century industrial architecture including (furniture, mechanical and household equipment), «this phenomenon is affecting designers the world over, but nowhere is the situation so complex, so well crystallized and so rich in examples as in Italy». It developed outside the mainstream of Europe currents because Italy in its geographical position quite separated form the continent. In fact the distraction of the war has resulted the lack of materials and resource and leaded the Italian researches in the field of architecture and industrial design (especially in Fifties) to concentrate on the analytical and formalistic lines of the object, neglecting the function of the product which was the most interest of the Bauhaus in Germany. The researches aimed to define the new relationship between the object and the space and to reach the international level of production.

In Sixties and Seventies the orientations were developed to more consider the pop art which forwarded the industrial design to the mass production. It aimed to transform the traditional Italian middle class to industrial middle class using the developed materials like plastic, stainless steel and inox. In fact at the end of Seventies Italian designers succeeded to reach the highest level in industrial design and they became very well-known internationally. From those names we mention Joe Colombo and his important development in micro-environment, Gae Aulenti, Mari and Ettore Sottsass.

Ambasz who served as a curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art for six years, got the honor to host those important designers with their great achievements. In 1969 an article written by him with design program for the exhibition and printed in Casabella (nn. 459-460, 1971) one year before encouraged the Italian designers to make incursion into imaginary realms. The intention of this exhibition and catalogue «has been to recognize the cultural achievements of modern Italian design, to honor the accomplishments of Italy’s gifted designers». The work was more than worthy to be considered and documented. It constitutes a vital reference to designers as well as planners and critics in the world.

As the industrial design entered all field of architecture starting with the new techniques that occurred in construction ending with all types of furniture. The exhibition concentrated with domestic landscape only thus before being deeply explored this fascinating achievements it is worthy noting the linguistic meaning of the term Domestic as it institute the vertical column of our task: «it is household or family affairs; of one's own country, not foreign; native, home-made, kept by or living with man; home-keeping; fond of home; hence domestically» (H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Clarendon Press, Great Britain 1934).

The book presents three sections which are: consumer products, domestic units and urban milieu. Each section is prefaced by editorial introduction which was helpful for making an illustrated image of the presented issue. The first section shows the objects participated in the exhibition, dividing them in to three parts depending on their meanings: objects selected for their formal and technical means, for their sociocultural implication and for their implications of more flexible pattern of use and arrange. The objects shown in the book were enough understandable with it’s means and didn’t need to some illustrations or descriptions. While some of them express their author's feelings-irony and nostalgia like walls or ceiling lamps. The middle section deals with the design program for domestic environment, including photographs and descriptions of prototypes. The program required that those environments firstly should be suitable for industrial development and that Italian families of middle income should be able to afford them, secondly to explore possible approaches to the problems of the society's context. Those examples were chosen as the diversity and variety of ideas and orientations. Each prototype prefaced with a curriculum of the participator and a detailed description written by the designer concerning their proposed project. The participators are well-known Italian designers. While the third section of the book contains historical and critical articles which were also written by famous critics such as Paolo Portoghesi, Vittorio Gregotti and others. The historical articles presented the Art Nouveau in Italy (Paolo Portoghesi), The Futurist Construction of the Universe (Maurizio Fagiolo dell Arco), The Beginning of Modern Research, 1930-1940 (Leonardo Benevolo) and Italian Design, 1945-1971 (Vittorio Gregotti). Those articles reflecting the history and current architectures in Italy prefaced the exhibition from the 1990 till 1970: «Through these articles, one may trace the story of the continuing efforts of the Italian architects to rid their profession of backwardness and provincialism».

The critical articles dealt with same period but with more critical and analytical intention relating the design and designers with terms like society, policy, economy, ideology and technology. Giulio Carlo Argan wrote in this field the Ideological Development in the Thought an Imagery of Italian Design illustrating the conditions after the second war and the idea of design of reestablishing relation with the civilized world, the conditions of Italian society explaining the gap between the largely industrial north and the south and the linguistic character of design of the age. While Alessandro Merdini wrote The Land of Good Design, defining design with two points of view, as a formal factor and as a political. Presenting the problems of the tradition from the craft process to the industrial one which influenced by the advance of new technologies and industrial production system that resulted to the problem of quantity and the mass production. The purpose of the essay A Design from New Behavior, by Filiberto Menna, is to rifer to the crisis situation in design and ideology.

The exhibition wanted to show new vision of home and how new technology and a new situation in society would initiate completely new plans and interior designs: «This book is another good statement of the fact that designers can only solve problems if society will give them the opportunity to do so» (J. Lyndon in Urban Studies Journal, n.2, 1973).

Ambasz ended the book with an excellent summery. Behind closed doors which define domestic living, this panorama describes not only domestic spaces and strategies but it is a social, political, architectural and anthropological transformation which not only influences Italy but the world over. It is a fascinating trip discovering a continuous change, growth of space and palaces that can be seen under a skin that is apparently unchanged.

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Emilio Ambasz, born in 1943 in Argentina, a practicing designer, who studied Architecture and Fine Art in the United State of America at Princeton University and at Ulm in Germany. He served as Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York (1970-1976), where he directed and installed numerous influential exhibits on architecture and industrial design. Ambasz has been the subjects of numerous international publications as well as museum and art gallery exhibitions; he also holds many of industrial and mechanical design patents. Taught at Princeton University's School of Architecture, was visiting professor at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany and has lectured at many important American universities.

He wrote also: Architecture of Luis Barragan (New York 1976); The International Design Yearbook 2 International Design Yearbook (s.l. 1986). Several monographies are on Ambasz’s work.