Italian Design
In postwar Milan the factories, the craftsmen and the museums all happened to be in the same city. In 1954 the department store La Rinascente created a prize called the Compasso d'Oro (run by ADI from 1964), a prize that made a well-made everyday object something a country could be proud of. The people in this band made chairs and lamps, and they also taught. From the late 1950s Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo produced a series of furniture they called Ready Made. The Sella of 1957 is a real racing bicycle saddle set on a steel column, balanced unsteadily on a hemispherical base. There is another chair on this map that came from a bicycle: the tubular steel one Breuer thought up in 1925 from a set of handlebars. Thirty years apart, two classics out of different parts of the same machine. And the phrase readymade itself belongs to 1917, when Duchamp put a urinal into an exhibition. A manufactured object placed there to ask what art is came back, half a century later, as something you could sit on. Bruno Munari began running workshops for children in the late 1950s — not teaching so much as letting them handle materials, forms and colours freely. His 1966 book Design as Art argued that design should be not only beautiful but within everyone's reach. In 1974 Enzo Mari published Autoprogettazione, self-design: he released drawings for furniture anyone could build from boards and nails, and said go ahead, make it yourself. Open source, done with furniture, half a century early. In 1972 the Museum of Modern Art staged Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, and this country's design became a language the world spoke. People who gave away the making rather than the made thing — the same shape as the Bauhaus.