ABSTRACT
Following a week of exclusive events and private viewings, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York officially opened its ambitious exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, to the public on 26 May 1972. In addition to 180 consumer objects designed over the preceding decade, the exhibition also brought together eleven ‘environment’ installations commissioned and constructed specifically for the show. For exhibition curator Emilio Ambasz, recent developments in Italian design were interesting beyond any basic stylistic considerations. They demonstrated what he saw as a ‘growing awareness of design understood as an activity whereby man creates artefacts in order to mediate between his fears and aspirations and the pressures imposed by the natural and cultural world’.1
