Discover the Anti-Design art movement, a reaction to consumerism and functionalism in design, emerging in 1960s Italy and influencing urban planning and public spaces.
Extract
[...] Anti-design then invests in public space by offering furniture at a lower cost and accessible to all. However, it is worth noting the emergence of a trend that has been gaining momentum over the past few years and which is mobilizing the attention of municipalities and, as a result, designers. Cities are increasingly inclined to control urban planning and its users, in order to counteract delinquency and vandalism. In this way, the intention is to create well-maintained and orderly public spaces. [...]
[...] Some designers stand out and take the reins of this new perspective, such as Ettore Sottsass and the groups Memphis, Radical Design, Archigram, or Superstudio. Each contributes to the expansion of the movement and brings their influence. Concretely, in terms of urban planning, if the industrial revolution gives the lead to the reorganization of the city and urban furniture, anti-design participates in the debate on the attention given to living spaces and public equipment that is reborn at the time, in the 50s. The city becomes increasingly a staged living space, no longer only structured around transportation networks. It is a project. [...]
[...] Design art is not spared. At its origin, this vast movement that is anti-design art wishes to react to this excessive search for functionalism that governed design creation. It thus returns to more eccentricity, distortion, sensitivity, and freedom in the expression of forms, to obtain an art without industrial requirements. Therefore, anti-design art tends to oppose design whose purpose is to seduce in order to attract, target consumption, and increase sales, which leads to the inversion of the sought-after purpose. [...]
[...] In the face of the controversial objectives of this discipline, we ask ourselves certain questions about its relevance. Has anti-design become an art compromised by the commissioner? What is it really trying to achieve? What are its objectives, its desired goals? How does it act on the world in this way? How is this art perceived by users, from an aesthetic but also utilitarian point of view? In other words, we are asking ourselves if anti-design art has not become a vicious, selective, elitist, and discriminatory art, and we question its limits. [...]
