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American Architecture Comes of Age: European Reaction to H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan by Leonard K. Eaton, and: The Anti-Rationalists ed. by Nikolaus Pevsner, J. M. Richards (review)

liberate the imaginative potential of the individual. Emilio Ambasz, Curator of Design, has ably examined these points in an exhibition catalogue that provides a comprehensive review of the current crisis in Italian design. The crisis is the ethical problem of defining the role of design. The designers’ responses vary, on the one hand, from acceptance of design as a tool of consumption that produces saleable products invested with status meaning to the rejection of this concept in favor of the propagation of political ideas. Ambasz had detected these extreme positions and several in between and documented them with artists’ statements and excellent photographs and diagrams. Among the designers of individual objects, Ambasz presents first the ‘conformists’ who refine existing forms, taking advantage of new materials and processes to provide such traditional needs of domestic life as furniture, appliances and tableware. The ‘reformists’ are convinced of the need for structural changes in society but, feeling unable to effect them, confine themselves to rhetorical designs, sometimes ironic, bizarre or humorous, that comment on the roles of objects in contemporary society. A third group attempts to provide flexibility by means of systematic arrangement of modular individual objects that constitute the domestic setting as an intermediate solution where structural changes in a building are not feasible. The remainder of the exhibit further illustrated ideals of flexibility, mobility and the multiple use of objects. The demands of daily life were re-evaluated and provided for but with objects felt to be devoid of status value and social connotation. By de-mystifying objects, the designers hoped to free individuals of preconceptions and to allow them to develop their own domestic rituals and patterns. Despite the deliberately exposed plumbing and electrical outlets and matter-of-fact surface treatment, the objects succeed in spite of themselves; like Dada objects, they are non-art probably destined to be accepted as art. The more radical designers eschewed the invitation to provide designs for new types of interiors and, instead, put forward political statements questioning the capitalist system that imposes daily rituals and an official culture. They see their role less as designers of objects than as partakers in the class struggle and their confrontation environments took various forms: metaphors, utopias, scenarios for political action (distributed as newspapers during the exhibit) and empty or non-environments, which refuse to narrow our choices to a single model. Even among the radical designers the intent was to provide an individual with the means of shaping and managing his daily existence and altering it at will. In many cases, the objects and environment were intended as media a t the disposal of an individual’s taste. Art and design historians will find in the book a useful section reviewing Art Nouveau, Futurism and other preand post-World War I1 developments in Italian product design and architecture. Six critical articles provide further background that clarifies the positions taken in the designers’ statements. Italian design is examined in the light of social and economic planning, the current housing situation and the aesthetic and political premises of the counter-design movement. Along with the lucid Introduction and Summary by Emilio Ambasz, they make the book a stimulating document of value to those concerned with the interrelations of art and technology and the influence of social attitudes on design theory and practice.