Today’s city is no longer identified by architecture, but by the market, by the goods that circulate in it". “The relationship between man and his objects is rapidly changing” he continues, arguing that “designing today actually means contributing to the design of a new metropolitan life. The “spiritual guide”of Archizoom by that time, as Ugo La Pietra defined him, Branzi was at the forefront of that Italian radical design wave that Lapo Binazzi of UFO, again on Domus, would describe as an all-too-bourgeois phenomenon, capable, however, of questioning and highlighting the contradictions of the orthodox-Marxist positions of the late 1960s ( Domus 578, January 1978), a wave Branzi wisely rode in order to practice a thorough “technical destruction of culture”.īranzi is indeed an explorer of timeless primitivisms, as in the raw wood elements that complete his 1985 pieces ( Abiti neoprimitivi, Domus 667, December 1985), and a promoter of a strong “presentist” realism, when it comes to identifying a new path of growth for contemporary design, as recounted in the programmatic points of the Domus Academy, of which he has been the educational director since its foundation in 1982: “Design today is no longer a discipline based on an ‘infallible’ design methodology, as it was believed until the 60s a discipline, that is, so rational that it could solve any kind of problem,” he wrote on Domus 633. At midnight sharp (.) the spire of the Empire State Building lights up, and the Madonnina appears!”Įxactly 50 years ago, a young Andrea Branzi made his debut on the pages of Domus ( Italian Power, Domus 511, June 1972) with what is perhaps the most important document on “Italy: the new domestic Landscape” exhibition at MoMA – after its legendary catalogue, of course: a small editorial column that kicks up a fuss about all the establishment’s rituals, just to join them again the minute after, throwing aphorisms and neon lightning bolts and various kinds of candy. etc., and they all thank Italy for what it has done and what it is doing for the world. (.) Then they all speak into the microphone, about us, about Domus, about Galliano liqueur, about Carnera etc. “Rockefeller greets us from the 350th floor: ‘Come here, come on darlings, get in, please!’ And there comes Ettore Sottsass, sitting on the hood of a taxi going the wrong way down the Avenue of the Americas, all dressed as a Mexican in pink tulle, and there come the 13 Archizooms in asbestos shoes with magnetized soles, with purple shirts open on the chest on which hangs a small transistor bijoux, and here’s La Pietra in tango-coloured lamé, electric tie, and his all-gold clarinet.
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