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Heresy and heroics: The debate on the alleged ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design around 1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Kjetil Fallan
Kjetil Fallan*
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
*
∗Email: kjetil.fallan@ntnu.no
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Abstract

In the course of the 1950s, Italian industrial design underwent a period of professionalisation and rose to international fame under the banners of ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘la linea italiana’. Seen in retrospect, Italian design retained this position during the 1960s, with the onset of avant-garde ‘pop-design’ and ‘anti-design’. Yet this future development was by no means a given in the Italian design community at the turn of the decade. At this crucial moment, between the rationality of the first postwar period and the playfulness of the second, allegations of a ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design raised a storm in the professional community for a brief period around 1960. This article analyses this heated debate, focusing on its most pronounced manifestation: the discussions in the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) and the design magazine Stile Industria following the jury's decision to withhold the Gran Premio Nazionale Compasso d'Oro for 1959.

Keywords

Italian industrial designStile IndustriaCompasso d'OroAssociazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI)
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , August 2009 , pp. 257 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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