Italian Design in the 20th century

Using the publication DOMUS as the starting point for researching Italian designers from from 1940’s-1980’s.

Italian Design in the 20th century was kick started by the Italian Futurists. Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism 1909.

Many great thinkers and creators came together in this movement which admired speed, technology youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. This connected with the facist values which were growing within Europe at the time. However with the onset of ww2 and the fall of Mussolini and facism in Italy the Futurists lost their momentum.

However, the creators and innovators in Italy were still creating and towards the end of the 1940’s, architect Gio Ponti, through the ‘Domus’ magazine, was divulging the results achieved by world renowned architects, decorators and designers. From this arose a liberal-style of design, open to any kind of experimentation.

Below are pages taken from various Domus publications from 1940-1980.

Carlo Di Carli

Carlo de Carli (born 1910, Milan, Italy–died 1999, Milan, Italy) was an Italian modernist designer, architect, essayist, and academic. He graduated from Politecnico di Milano in 1934 and later worked at the studio of Gio Ponti, subsequently opening a studio with Renato Angeli.

Carli was well known for his prolific design work in furniture especially of desks, tables and chairs.

Laminated wood veneers in modernist furniture and homes

The technique of layering cross-grained veneers to make a material stronger than solid wood has been around for a long time – as early as 2600 BC in ancient Egypt. But it was not until around the 1760s that furniture workshops in Britain began to use plywood techniques for specialist tasks, such as cut-out decorative patterns known as fretwork.

By the 1830s, the introduction of mechanised saws caused a huge drop in the cost of veneers. Designers and engineers started to investigate plywood as one of the ‘new’ materials of the industrial age. Plywood became particularly prized for its capacity to be moulded into strong, curved forms, in part because this offered a cheaper alternative to cast metal. Patents were issued for a range of plywood products and designs.

Plywoods links to the industrial revolution and the modern world

Plywood became increasingly visible from the 1920s, however, when designers in many different fields began to exploit and celebrate its ability to be shaped into strong, curved forms.

Unlike other industrial materials such as steel or aluminium, plywood did not require large-scale factory production and could be easily moulded in small workshops using simple tools. This meant it was often used for experimental forms and shapes. These could then be quickly passed on to other workshops and tested in the designs of various kinds of objects.

Alongside influential experiments by modernist designers and architects, plywood’s most significant use in this period was as a material for aeroplane design. From the 1910s to 1945, plywood’s strength and lightness allowed for the construction of radical new planes that revolutionised the nature of flight.

Albert Viani

In modernism we see forms represented through deconstructive suggested shapes. The literal is released in favour of the suggestive.

In Fabrizio Carola’s prototype for a bathroom we can see the curves of Viani’s female nude translated into Carola’s bathroom.

Hotel in Apulia by Gianemilio, Piero and Anna Monti

This 1969 Hotel designed by Gianemilio, Piero and Anna Monti manifest the sensibilities of the 1960’s. Spaces of the future using materials such as plastic and synthetic materials. The orbs of the lights influenced by the 1960’s space race and the obsession of humans with space. On earth designers sought to bring the future and the world around us into the spaces we interacted with. We can also think of the madmen culture from the USA. Freuds nephew Edward Bernays revolutionised the way The West lived (watch ‘Century Of The Self’. The hunger for the best, the new and obsession with wealth manifested in the way homes were furnished and new objects were consumed.

However by 1978, we can see there is a move towards longevity and reusing. Marcello Cuneo created a sofa with washable and changeable covers. A way to reuse and consume less!