Environments and Counter Environments: Experimental Media in Italy the New Domestic Landscape

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Exhibitions

The celebrated 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art embodied a careful, analytical approach to categorization. The exhibition encountered the dynamic and complexly political Italian design context of the early seventies, which it examined and organized into a matrix of categories, differences and distinctions.

A first order of distinction separated Objects - reformist, conformist or contestatory - from Environments, themselves divided among design as postulation, design as commentary and counterdesign as postulation. In a cunning reversal the Objects section was installed in the comparatively natural environment of the sculpture garden while the Environments were placed within the more conventionally institutional space of the museum galleries. This internalizing maneuver implied that the exhibition would stage an assessment of not only these specific environments but also of “environment” as an architectural term or strategy. By 1972 “environment” had already circulated through architecture and design from across a range of disciplines and through diverse filiations, from the environmental design movement and its association with the social and behavioral sciences, to biology, cybernetics and the defense industries, through to a more current notion of environment as linked to questions of ecology. While discriminating among the various attitudes, politics and strategies of the participants the exhibition also tested the viability of the category itself, and at the same time considered the potential survival or disappearance of architecture, away from its objecthood and into an environment of perceptual relations, behavioral configurations, and “domestic rituals.”

To demonstrate their environments’ alterability the designers were asked to provide a film component. Several of the architects instead chose other media approaches, while Enzo Mari refused the installation and submitted only a text for the catalogue. Implicit in the responses was recognition that the conjunction of environment and media, especially within the intensely scrutinized location of the museum, would have the capacity to generate what Ugo La Pietra would call “unbalancing systems.“ Beyond illustrating the performance of the environments, the films and other media projects more carefully registered the design positions of the architects especially as calibrated in relation to a recent history of experimental multimedia work, and expanded media practices.

The current exhibition brings together for the first time since 1972 the entire set of films produced for the original exhibition, many of which survive only from the 8 mm cartridges onto which they were transferred for the 1972 exhibition. The related design documents show a range of attitudes toward the conception and theoretical imperatives of the environments themselves and in this respect the current exhibition encounters again medias and environments and their potential for thinking anew the boundaries of architecture, domestic spaces, their conditions and territories.

Curators: Peter Lang, Luca Molinari, Mark Wasiuta

This exhibition traveled to the Swiss Architecture Museum (SAM), Basel; the Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB), Barcelona; and the Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm.

Support for this presentation has been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, with additional support from the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago and viapiranesi, Milan.