Rossi, Catharine

Playing with the Povera: Connections between Art,

Architecture and Design in 1970s Italy
Main Image:Gruppo 9999, prototype of Vegetable Garden House
at Space Electronic. Gruppo 9999, courtesy of Carlo Caldini.

Piero Gilardi and arte povera took place amidst a wider set of
avant-garde practices in Italian art, design and architecture in the
late 60s and early 1970s. These interconnections have not been
sufciently explored, yet there are clear afnities and inuences
between the spaces and strategies, ideas and individuals that were
appropriated by a range of practitioners in a period of highly
politicized and experimental creativity. This article examines
Gilardi in this wider creative context, and in particular focuses on
parallels between the artist and Radical Design, the foremost area
of experimentation in Italian design this period. Written from the
perspective of a design historian, this has been an eye opening
exercise I looked to design as a way to understand more about
Gilardi, but this in turn has also cast the design of this period in
new light.

The early 1970s saw one of the largest exhibitions of Italian post-
war design, and Gilardi was in it. Called Italy: the New Domestic
Landscape: Archievements and Problems of Italian Design, it
opened at New Yorks MoMA in May 1972, curated by the
Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz.[1] A seminal exhibition in
Italys design history, the exhibition was conceived to show the
breadth of Italian design expression. It consisted of 180 objects
produced over the previous decade, exhibited in wooden cases in
MoMAs sculpture garden, and eleven environments displayed
inside the Museum that had been especially commissioned from
both new and more established Italian architects, including Mario
Bellini, Ettore Sottsass and the Superstudio group.

This dual curatorial focus mirrored the two main aspects of the
show. On the one hand it represented Italys prowess in design.
Following the end of World War Two, Italian had become a major
international force as desirable luxuries by architects such as Gio
Ponti and Vico Magistretti dominated the design scene, achieved
through experimentation with traditional as well as new materials
such as plastic, whose pluralistic materiality saw it present at
every stage of the design spectrum from this period.[2]

On the other hand was what constituted Ambaszs main interest in

Italian design, and another quality that set its design culture apart
from other nations at this time - its critical and theoretical content.
The exhibition was informed by the emergence in Italy of what
Ambasz called a high level of critical consciousness amongst its
designers, who were beginning to question designs role as the
purveyor of market place commodities, and instead promoted the
use of design as a tool for socio-cultural technique.[3] This was
part of a growing climate of contestation in Italy that had
permeated Italys design and architecture professions and which
informed Gilardis practice too.[4] In the eld of design, this
experimental arm of practice was called Radical Design, a term
coined by the art critic Germano Celant, most known for this
patronage of the arte povera movement, whose activities also
included contributions to the design magazine Casabella in this
period.[5]

Radical Design had rst emerged in Italy in the late 1960s,

practiced by the likes of Sottsass and Archizoom Associati and
Superstudio, two groups established in 1966 by students from
Florences architecture school. They represented the rst wave of
the movement, that ran from the mid to late 1960s, which was
dened by objects such as Sottsasss Superboxes (g. 1 - below),
designed in 1966, and Archizoom Assocatis Safari sofa from
1968, both of which were put into production by Poltronova, a
edgling Tuscan manufacturer open to these avant-garde
experiments.[6] These were objects infused by references to lowly
pop culture and identiable for their appropriation of the formal
and material languages of bad taste, eclecticism and kitsch, all
carefully designed to deal a blow to Italys reputation for
providing the elegant, tasteful products of la dolce vita.[7]
 Ettore Sottsass, Superbox Maria Assunta Radice, Sottsass Archive.

The Superboxes and Safari sofa were displayed in the Objects

part of Italy: New Domestic Landscape. This large section was
subdivided into three further categories, organised according to
their degrees of radical expression. These were: Conformist,
which encompassed the vast majority of the works, and which
were dened by exploring the aesthetic quality of single objects;
Reformist, whose designers largely followed the Radical Design
strategy of subverting familiar cultural symbols - and
Contestatory, whose followers believed that objects could no
longer be conceived in autonomous but rather relational terms,
creating objects that were exible in their use and arrangement.
[8] This last included Cini Boeris Serpentone for Arex (g. 2,
below) from 1971, a polyurethane foam seating system that the
user could choose to be cut to the length desired a formal
freedom that this new material enabled.[9]
 Cini Boeri, Serpentone sofa, Arex

Gilardi was present in the Reformist section, with Sassi, his

series of different sized polyurethane foam seating forms painted
to give the appearance of rocks. They had been designed in 1967
for Gufram, a Turinese manufacturer set up by the Gugliermetto
brothers who embraced the emerging Radical Design ethos, most
explicitly in their multipli series of limited edition production runs
that began with Gilardis sassi in 1967.[10]
The companys patronage of Radical Design also saw the inclusion
in the multipli series of objects such as Pratone, or large lawn, a
green varnished polyurethane foam seating arrangement-cum-
playful landscape designed in 1971 by Gruppo Strum, a Turinese
group of architects interested in the idea of design as a vehicle for
social and political protest.[11]

Pratone and Sassi were shown together alongside works in yet

another subsection within the Reformist category those whose
forms dialogued with the existing product landscape through what
Ambasz described in the catalogue as the device of giving their
designs the guises of nature.[12] Although this interest in nature
by Italys Radical Designers is largely unexplored, there has been
examination of arte povera artists marked interest in nature.[13]
From Pino Pascalis acrylic Vedova Blu to Michelangelo
Pistolettos mirror paintings, the living, the vegetal and the
environmental were persistent tropes; as Celant remarked in 1969,
with arte povera animals, vegetables and minerals have cropped
up in the art world.[14]

Nature appeared in other another Gilardi set of works - the Tappeti

Nature, rst made in 1965 and shown at Turins Galleria Sperone
in 1966.[15] Like the Sassi, the Tappeti were deeply illusionistic
works, made possible by the material possibilities of polyurethane
foam. Hyper-real renderings of natural landscapes, from seascapes
to forests and cabbage patches, these were objects conceived for
the domestic interior a location that was one of the many blurs
between design and art in this period. These also included
crossovers of function; the Tappeti were designed to be used and
bodily engaged with, rather than viewed from a distance; and also
production - with 1967s Rotolo di Natura you could purchase not
just a square of nature, but a whole length, cut from a large roll
located in gallery. This made the Rotolo an assembly line object
just like Boeris Serpentone, a reproducible form of nature like
Pratone, whose square edges could be joined up to make a lawn of
innite size.[16]

In 1966 the Tappeti appeared in an article in Domus, the

architectural and design magazine that was one of the main voices
of Radical Design in this period. Written by Sottsass, the article
described Gilardis interest in nature as an anticipation of its death:

Gilardi's Nature is neither comfortable nor safe. It is not an

alibi but it is a rite. It is not a victorious nature, it is not a
violent nature, neither savage nor happy.

It is a miserable nature of loss. A nature of fallen apples

pumpkins from a suburban vegetable garden when the
happy owers of the peas and beans, zinnias and dahlias
have withered and the fruit has been picked, a nature of
ears of corn when the June poppies, July wheat and August
peaches have gone, and the stumps and roots remain in the
devastated elds, a nature at a loss.[17]

Gilardi wasnt the only artist to express this apparent mourning for
natures demise. The perceived impending end of nature fuelled
several other practitioners work at this time, amidst widespread
concern at the effect of advancing technology, industrialisation and
urbanisation on Italys rural areas.[18] Yet there is a paradox in
Gilardis eulogy for the natural, one that is manifested in the
materials and product modes used for the Tappeto; Gilardi
expressed this loss of nature through industrial means.

This apparent contradiction was an issue addressed at the time as

critics such as Tommaso Trini and Henry Martin identied, the
arte povera artists did not see nature and technology as antithetical.
[19] They used the materials of both realms in their found and
elaborated states, as they saw a kinship between the products of
nature and culture that Trini attributed to the inuence of the
anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strausss structuralist ideas.[20] This
was part of a larger inuence in anthropology at this time, and also
a renegotiated understanding of what constituted the natural in a
highly technological world.[21]

Furthermore, as Gilardi identied in the 1980s in response to

Sottsasss article, while he acknowledged that his work expressed
an anxiety toward the loss of nature he disputed they were an
exorcist ritual that anticipated natures death, because at the same
time as they expressed his fear at the demise of the natural, they
also expressed a faith in technology.[22]

This nature-linked technological utopianism provides another link

back to the design practice on show in Italy: New Domestic
Landscape, chiey in the Environments section of the
exhibition. Like the Objects section, the Environments were
subdivided into three categories organised by their degree of
critical intent; commentary, Design as Postulation and
Counter Design as Postulation.[23] Technology, and plastic in
particular, was a dominant presence, ranging from the afrmative
utopianism of Joe Colombos vision of tomorrows technology-
saturated home to Gaetano Pesces dystopian archaeological dig of
contemporary society, rendered, like Gilardis works, out of
polyurethane foam.[24]

Superstudio were present in this section too, with their proposal

for a life without objects.[25] They envisioned a world whose
built environment no longer consisted of xed architecture but
instead consisted of a single grid, a universal energy network
designed for nomadic living. This, alongside the other
contestatory environments in the show, was an example of what
Ambasz described as a negative form of utopia for its present-
orientated ethos of destruction and reduction.[26] This is the same
concept we see in arte povera, an art form that Celant described as
based on taking away, eliminating, downgrading things to a
minimum, impoverishing signs to reduce them to their
archetypes.[27] In the context of design this is translated into the
destruction of what Ambasz termed the objects condition as a
market-orientated, middle-class status symbol and its
transformation into a communal, mentally stimulating and
participatory entity.[28] This was what Superstudio meant in their
vision not for a life without any objects, but for a life without
enslavement to them, a utopia whose material culture consisted of
neutral, disposable elements devoid of the alienation inherent in
commodity fetishism.[29]
As in Gilardis works, nature and technology co-exist in
Superstudios vision. The grids are accompanied by a variety of
scenes of the technology-infused pastoral; from horses and cattle
grazing in pastures with space shuttles looming above, to elds of
owers where a family can plug into the grid to service their basic
survival needs. On the one hand, there is a difference in their two
visions; while the innitude of this technology-infused nature is
part of Superstudios anti-consumerist critique, in Gilardis the
potentially endless reproducibility and hyperreality of the tappeto
is a problematic part of consumerism, what Laura Petican
describes as a commentary on the commodication of existence
gaining momentum in a period of rapid industrialization.[30] Yet
despite this apparent contradiction between Superstudio and
Gilardis work, on the other hand there is a key commonality
between them, evident in this juxtaposition of the natural and the
articial: a desire to bring man and nature closer in a post-
consumerist world.

This concept was most explicit in another Environment on

display at the MoMA exhibition: the Vegetable Garden House,
conceived by Gruppo 9999 (see main image above), a group of
four Florentine architects set up in 1967. Although one of the
lesser known characters in Italys Radical Design history, their
environment chimes with many of its key ideas and approaches.
The group were one of two winners of the Exhibitions
Competition for Young Designers a worthy prize but one that
meant that, unlike the other Environments, their entries were not
physically created at MoMA, but instead represented in
photographic form in the Museum and reproduced, as with the
other entries, on paper in the exhibitions catalogue.[31]

Gruppo 9999s proposal consisted of a number of multi-coloured

collages that, like Superstudios vision, took as their basis the form
of the grid. Theirs consisted of collages of gridded paper variously
overlaid with text, photographs and illustrations: in one, close-ups
of cabbages and Brussels sprouts are accompanied with graphs of
growing seasons; in another there are aerial shots of children lying
in vegetable patches. Together they represent all the components
of the bedroom of their Vegetable House.[32]

The idea for the Vegetable House originated in the late 1960s, in
a series of workshops and performances that Gruppo 9999 had
been conducting at Space Electronic, a nightclub they had set up in
1969 in Florence, and where they did experiments with groups
such as Superstudio.[33] This realm provides another link
between art and design practice - nightclubs were a key space for
experimentation in this period. Gilardis Tappeto was displayed at
Turins Piper nightclub, one of a number of Pipers that had
sprung up in cities such as Rome and Florence in the 1960s, which
were ran by members of the art and architectural avant-garde.[34]
Other artists associated with arte povera, such as Marisa Merz and
Pistoletto, would also be amongst those to appropriate this site for
displays and performances in this period, as part of a conscious
turn away from the conventional spaces of the art industry at this
time.[35] Among the performances and installations that took
place at Space Electronic, Gruppo 9999 created a prototype of the
Vegetable Garden House including a real vegetable garden that
represented the full-scale prototype of the living room of the
MoMA Garden House.

Gruppo 9999s project was informed by the same concern for our
relationship with nature as we see in Gilardis Sassi and Tappeti
natura. As Carlo Caldini of Gruppo 9999 noted recently, nature
was a dominant theme in their work at this time: nature
increasingly fascinated and engrossed our everyday observations.
This was at a time when the world seemed to be dominated by
technology, as if there were a frantic race that everyone was
involved in, but without anyone realizing that irreparable damage
was being done to nature.[36]

In addition to the Vegetable Garden House, they organised

performances and produced other collages and documents that
proclaimed the importance of nature:

RELAX. Huge energy cycles are supporting our planet. [ ...

] Our experience depends only on the forms of life of the
known and unknown phenomena that manifests [ ... ] in the
harmony and elegance of nature. Man and his environment
are at the center of the Gruppo 9999s research, in which a
balance between scientic progress and nature is found.
This is happening thanks to highly sophisticated
technologies cleansed from rubbish and pollution that work
exclusively for the service and protection of man and his
environment.[37]

Gruppo 9999 called a balance between scientic progress and

nature, just like Gilardi. There are differences here - while
Gilardis works operated through the experience of sitting on
them, through a bodily engagement that would render the
articiality of their natural qualities fully comprehended, in the
Vegetable Garden House it was the act of growing produce that
would bring man in a closer relationship with nature. Yet this was
based on an apparent paradox: as with Superstudios collages and
in the Sassi and Tappeto: they at once expressed a faith in nature
and contemporaneously commented on our distance from it in
contemporary society, and do so through technological means.[38]

The Sassi and Tappeto were the only products that Gilardi made in
this period. In the late 1960s Gilardi stopped making for a long
period, concerned in part at the commodication of his works and
objecting at the gallery system.[39] He was right to be concerned
it was precisely this phenomenon that the architectural historian
Manfredo Tafuri accused the architects of the rst wave of Radical
Design of. He criticised the likes of Archizoom and Superstudio
with their Poltronova-made products for peddling what he called
an increasingly commercialized form of irony, their approach not
up to the task of real social change.[40]

While Gilardi did not design any more products in this period,
these were not the only objects he created. In 1966 he exhibited a
series of works including the Carriola (wheelbarrow) and Sega
(saw) shown in Arte Abitabile, held at the Sperone Gallery in
1966.[41] Celant picked up on the shift inherent in these works at
the time. Clearly comparing them to the illusionary qualities of
the Tappeti and Sassi, he states that these objects are concrete
rather than mediated or mimetic manifestations of his instrumental
and functional action. For those who know the hard-working
Gilardi, they are his symbols.[42] In essence these were tools,
their functionality and instrumentality shorthand for Gilardis
increasing involvement in the everyday of political activism.

These objects, and Gilardis cessation of object making, could be

seen as representing a point of departure between the artist and
Italys Radical Design movement. On the one hand this was true;
Gilardis work bore little resemblance to the tactics of critical
object making that dened the of Radical Design of the late
1960s. Yet Radical Design was a game of two halves; and with
the emergence of the second wave of Radical Design that emerged
in the early 1970s - a shift in approach on which Italy New
Domestic Landscape was pivoted commonalities persisted.

In part in response to the problem that Tafuri outlined, Italys

designers were experiencing what Celant and fellow art critic
Filiberto Menna described in the exhibitions catalogue as a crisis
of the object.[43] There was an attempt to shift away from
designing products to what Menna described as a design for
behaviours the creation and exploration of behaviours for
designing, making and engaging with objects that went beyond the
commodied experience of Italys consumerist society.[44] This
was the approach that dened the second phase of Radical Design,
which ran from the early to mid 1970s. Just as with its rst phase
there were different, and occasionally divergent approaches, yet it
did contain some common themes and tropes amongst them, the
concept of the tool.

The tool appears in a number of different ways in the second wave

of Radical Design, too numerous to go into here. It was most
explicit in the Global Tools group, set up in 1973 by individuals
and groups including Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio and
Gruppo 9999.[45] This was a group that pursued the idea of a
liberated, spontaneous creativity, explored through workshops that
used objects tools to invent a new, participatory and play-based
way of designing and making.

Ultimately all the objects discussed here from Gilardis Carriola

and Sassi to Gruppo 9999s collages and installations shared a
tool-like quality - an instrumentality that attempted to overcome
their commodity status to become tools for political protest, for
change a status achieved by the means, but also materials, from
which they were manufactured.

But of course there are differences. In 1976 Global Tools

dissolved, and its end marked the dissolution of Radical Design,
its utopianism replaced by the nihilism and cynical commercialism
of Postmodernism. Yet this wasnt Gilardis last endeavour: in the
1980s he returned to the world of object making and he continues
to pursue his critical, politically informed art practice today.
Gilardis signicance therefore lies in the legacy and longevity of
his creative practice, his approach providing a lesson for design to
learn from.


This work (excluding images) is licensed under aCreative

Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
License.

[1] For full details on the exhibition, see Emilio Ambasz, ed.,
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems
of Italian Design (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1972).

[2] For a comprehensive account of Italys post-war design history,

see Penny Sparke, Italian Design 1870 to the Present (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1988).

[3] Ambasz, Summary in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,

ed. Ambasz, p. 419.

[4] See Paola Nicolin,Protest by Design: Giancarlode Carlo and

the 14th Milan Triennale in Cold War Modern: Design 1945
1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V&A, 2008),
pp. 228 233.

[5] Alessandro Mendini in Joseph Grima, Alessandro Mendini and

Vera Sacchetti, The Role of Radical Magazines in The Italian
Avant-Garde: 1968 1976, ed. Alex Coles and Catharine Rossi
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), p. 8.

[6] For an account of Poltronovas activities, see Facendo Mobili

con Archizoom, Asti, Aulenti, Ceroli, de Pas d'Urbino Lomazzi,
Ernst, Fini, Mangiarotti, Marotta, Mendini, Michelucci, Nespolo,
Portoghesi, Ruf, Sottsass, Superstudio, Vignelli (Florence:
Poltronova Edizioni, 1977)

[7] Daniela Prina has accurately described this rst phase of Italys
Radical Design movement. Daniela Prina, Design as Conceptual
Research and Political Instrument: Role and Legacy of the Italian
Radical Movement in Networks of Design: Proceedings of the
2008 Annual International Conference, ed. Jonathan Glynne,
Fiona Hackney, Viv Minton (Boca Raton, Fla. : Universal
Publishers, c2009), p.101.

[8] Ambasz, Introduction in Italy: The New Domestic

Landscape, ed. Ambasz, (pp. 19 - 21) pp. 19 - 21.

[9] Paola Antonelli, MoMAs Italy: New Domestic Landscape

Revisited in The Italian Avant-Garde, ed. Coles and Rossi, pp.
32 - 34.

[10] The Rock Furniture: Design from Gufram

http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/the-rock-furniture-design-
from-gufram/ <accessed 3 April 2013>

[11] Prina, p. 102; Sparke, p. 193.

[12] Ambasz, Introduction in Italy: The New Domestic
Landscape, ed. Ambasz,, p. 21.

[13] Laura Petican, The Arte Povera Experience: Nature Re-

Presented in Paul Crowther and Isabel Wnsche, eds. Meanings
of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (London; New York:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 184 197.

[14] Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta

Editore, 1969), p. 225 in Petican, The Arte Povera Experience in
Meanings of Abstract Art, ed. Crowther and Wnsche, p. 184.

[15] For more on the Tappeti Nature, see Erik Verhagen, Piero
Gilardi: For an Aesthetic of Abnegation Artpress, June 2010, no.
368, p. 55 59.

[16] Matthias Kries in 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design

Museum Collection (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 1996),
p. 128.

[17] Ettore Sottsass, Piero Gilardi, Domus, December 1966, no.

445. Reproduced in 1966 Ettore Sottsass Jr
http://www.centrostudipierogilardi.org/en/pubblications/critical-
essays/7-1966-ettore-sottsass-jr-en <accessed 4 April 2013>

[18] Martin Holman, Arte Povera 1968, Art Monthly, November

2011, no. 351, p. 22.

[19] Henry Martin, Piero Gilardi, or the Technological Arcadia

in Flash Art n. 1, Rome, June 1967 trans. Gilda Williams in
Parallel Practices in Arte Povera, ed. Carolyn Christov-
Bakargiev, (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 279; Tommaso Trini,
Nuovo Alfabeto per Corpo e Materia Domus, January 1969, p.
47.

[20] Trini, p. 47.

[21] Alison J. Clarke, The Anthropological Object in Design:

From Victor Papanek to Superstudio in Design Anthropology:
Object Culture in the 21st Century, ed. Alison J. Clarke (Vienna:
Springer, 2011), p. 7487; Petican, The Arte Povera Experience
in Abstract Art, ed. Crowther and Wnsche, p. 186.

[22] Piero Gilardi, Dallarte alla vita dalla vita allarte Prints
Etc., Paris, 1982, pp. 11 12, trans. Gilda Williams in Parallel
Practices in Arte Povera, ed. Christov- Bakargiev, p. 282.

[23] Ambasz, INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTS

SECTION by Emilio Ambasz Press Release no. 43,
http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/4820/releases/MOMA_1972_0049_43.pdf?
2010 <accessed 4 April 2013>

[24] Gaetano Pesce, GAETANO PESCE in Italy: The New

Domestic Landscape, ed. Ambasz, pp. 212 222; Prina, p. 102.

[25] Superstudio, Description of the

Microevent/Microenvironment, in Italy: The New Domestic
Landscape, ed. Ambasz, p. 242
[26] Ambasz, Summary in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,
ed. Ambasz, p. 421.

[27] Celant, Arte Povera - Im Spazio (Genoa: Dizioni Masnata;

Trentalance, 1967) in Celant, Arte Povera, p. 31.

[28] Ambasz, Summary in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,

ed. Ambasz, p. 421.

[29] Ambasz, Summary, in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,

ed. Ambasz, p. 421; Superstudio, Description of the
Microevent/Microenvironment, in Italy: The New Domestic
Landscape, ed. Ambasz, p. 246.

[30] Petican, The Arte Povera Experience in Meanings of

Abstract Art, ed. Crowther and Wnsche, p. 193.

[31] The other winner was Studio Tecnico Gianantonio Mari.

[32] Mark Wasiuta, Luca Molinari and Peter Lang, Fabrication

Laboratory 9999 in Environments and Counter-Environments
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape MoMA 1972 (Barcelona:
DHUB, 2011) n.p., accessed 10 December 2011,
http://www.petertlang.net/design-culture/environments-and-
counter-enviro...

[33] Wasiuta, Moliarni and Lang, Fabrication Laboratory 9999.

[34] Christov-Bakargivev, Survey in Arte Povera, ed. Christov-

Bakargiev, 37; Gilardi in LeGrace G. Benson, Gabriele Muresu
and Piero Gilardi, An Interview with Piero Gilardi, Leonardo
vol. 1, no. 4, October 1968, p. 433; Andrea Branzi, The Hot
House: Italian New Wave Design, trans. C.H. Evans (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 54.

[35] Christov-Bakargivev, Survey in Arte Povera, ed. Christov-

Bakargiev, 37

[36] Carlo Caldini, Space Electronic in The Italian Avant-Garde,

ed. Coles and Rossi, p. 102.

[37] Gruppo 9999, Ricordi di architettura ( Florence:

Capponi,1972), n.p; trans. Rossi in Caldini, Space Electronic in
The Italian Avant-Garde, ed. Coles and Rossi, pp. 102 103.

[38] For more on Gruppo 9999s Vegetable Garden House and the
place of nature in their work see Rossi, Crafting a Design
Counterculture: the Pastoral and the Primitive in Italian Radical
Design, 19721976 in Made in Italy: New Perspectives on Italian
Design, ed. Grace Lees- Maffei and Ktejil Fallan (London: Berg,
2013 (forthcoming)).

[39] Christov-Bakargiev, Parallel Practices in Arte Povera, ed.

Christov-Bakargiev, p. 180.

[40] Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944

1985, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
 Press), p. 99.

[41] Christov-Bakargiev, Parallel Practices in Arte Povera, ed.

Christov-Bakargiev, p. 179.

[42] Celant, Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War, Flash Art,
November-December 1967, no. 5 in Celant, Arte Povera, p. 37

[43] Celant, Radical Architecture and Filippo Menna, A Design

for New Behaviours, in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, ed.
Ambasz, pp. 380-387, 405-414.

[44] Menna, A Design for New Behaviours, in Italy: The New

Domestic Landscape, ed. Ambasz, p. 405.

[45] For a discussion of Global Tools, see Rossi, Crafting Modern

Design in Italy from Post-War to Postmodernism (unpublished
PhD thesis) pp. 391 413.

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