ABSTRACT
An experimental, avantgarde design studio, Archizoom Associati specialized in industrial and architectural design and in urban planning, creating a number of visionary environments and fantasy furniture designs. Established in Florence in 1966 by architects Andrea Branzi-the theoretical leader-Gilberto Coretti, Paolo Deganello and Massimo Morozzi, the studio was joined two years later by industrial designers Dario and Lucia Bartolini. The group was similar to another Florentine studio, Superstudio, founded around the same time on similar principles and led by Adolfo Natalini. Like Superstudio, Archizoom was partly inspired by British Conceptual Design and Archigram. Its aesthetics demanded a reform of design that would enhance consumers’ awareness of both objects and architecture; to achieve this goal, members often produced ironical and mischievous projects, especially in their furniture designs, with playful allusions to the modern movement as well as to kitsch, pop and stylistic revivalism. Archizoom’s project for the standard polyurethane foam sofa, Superonda (1966), a two-piece sectional divan with a sinusoidal silhouette, was a paradigm of ‘counter-design’. As an ironic response to Le Corbusier’s famous injunction to clean up lounges and lives, Archizoom proposed a Safari sofa and palm-shaped Sanremo standing lamp with illuminating leaves (1968). The ‘Mies chair’, produced by Poltranova in 1969, was their commentary on the classical modernist armchair, and consisted of a stretch-rubber membrane supported by a triangular chromium frame. Their ‘dream bed’ Presagio di Rose (Presage of Roses) (1967) challenged the traditional understanding of good taste with its wilful and hardedged, neokitsch vulgarity.
