E T N I T O N S I «ALCHIMIA
C C A S E N I L P I C RESTED IN DIS
TOO OFTEN THE Milan-based design collective Studio Alchimia, founded by Alessandro Guerriero in 1976, is perceived merely as a way-station en route to the more renowned Memphis Group. Perhaps this is not surprising, especially given how both groups shared members — Memphis was founded by Ettore Sottsass in Milan in 1981 after he left Studio Alchimia — and co-ordinated an interdisciplinary program of industrial design, architecture, graphic design, craft and art. As Alessandro Mendini, a key member of Studio Alchimia, commented: ‘Alchimia is not interested in disciplines when these are considered according to their own rules. It is more important to explore those great empty spaces between them.’ The same could be said of Memphis. But look closer and it soon becomes apparent that the two are in fact quite distinct. One of the fundamental differences between them derives from the fact that Studio Alchimia had deeper roots than Memphis in the Italian radical design and anti-design movements which originated in the political heat of the late 1960s. As a result, the designs generated
by Studio Alchimia in its most intensive period (1976 – 80) still retain their ability to agitate. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical design had mounted a sharp rebuttal to the tasteful conventions and rigid doctrines of modernist design and architecture, particularly the way both were nurtured and protected by leading museums and universities in Italy. Two collectives, Superstudio and Archizoom, played a key role in this moment. Superstudio, founded in Florence in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, fashioned a series of conceptual architectural manifestos, most infamously the Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization, conceived in 1969. ‘If design is merely an inducement to consume [and] architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois models of ownership and society,’ declared Natalini in 1971, ‘then we must reject design [and] architecture.’ Archizoom, also founded in Florence in the same year as Superstudio, included amongst its members Dario and Lucia Bartolini, Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, and Massimo Morozzi. One of the
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group’s most extreme projects, No-Stop-City, was a speculative vision of a futuristic city, consisting of a panoply of continuous surfaces on which multifunctional furniture and clothing were placed. By the mid-1970s, the level of energy in the radical design groups had begun to ebb, as each of the designers started to pursue their own path in a gambit to find a way to realize their fantastical utopian paper experiments in the form of real tactile objects. Apropos Studio Alchimia’s development out of the radical design movement, Guerriero remarked: ‘On considering the problems of radical design, with all they implied critically with respect to other kinds of products, industries and situations, we decided that there was a space for a strong, disruptive force [in Studio Alchimia] …’ Harnessing a number of radical design ideas shored up Studio Alchimia’s programmatic attack on two fronts. One target was a modernism that was spent but still playing itself out under the soft cover of a now corporate International Style in the mid1970s. Another was the flimsy postmodernism of James Stirling and Michael Graves, the
Above, left to right: works by Alessandro Mendini for the Bau-Haus Collection: Modulandoi,1979, Poltrona di Proust, 1978; Kandissi; tapestry, 1979. Opposite: Kandissi, 1979 54