Antidesign, also known as radical design, was a movement were a number of designers began to rebel against the stylised elegance of modernism and began to form groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio. These designers were known as avant-garde, from the French term advance guard or vanguard, who are people, or works, that are experimental and/or innovative particularly with respect to art, culture and politics. These co-operatives became the think tanks for designing, creating prototypes and organising installations and events that illustrated their awareness for the environment rather than the individual object.

Through the exhibition of furniture in Milan by Ettore Sottsass, these groups became a significant force and well identified in the world of design as the Radical or Antidesign movement. This movement sought to renew the cultural and political role of design by rejecting the formalist values of Italian neomodernism and believe that the original aims of modernism, in the time, was nothing more than a cheap marketing tool. They also pursued to weaken the “good taste” and elite aesthetic values of modernism by employing design values strongly rejected and embrace ephemerality, irony, kitsch, strong colours and distortion of scale undermining the pure functionality value of an object and questioning the concept of taste of good design.

 

The Studio Alchimia group, led by Alessandro Mendini, aimed to promote transformations of everyday consumer goods into objects of aesthetic purpose. The goods were manufactured from cheap, readily available materials as they were regarded as one-offs but showed many characteristics of Modernism especially Bauhaus designs. These included bright colours and decorations, and disregard to symmetry of modernist design to asymmetrical characteristics.

This group also included; Ettore Sottsass Jr., Paola Navone, Andrea Branzi and Michele de Lucchi, and with Sottsass as its driving force, the movement’s events were carried out in individual groups but eventually merged as the Memphis collective. As Memphis began to emerge in Italy, the Antidesign movement, with its slogan of “liberation of decoration for its own sake” evolved into the internationally recognised style known as Postmodernism.

 

References.

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History of Design. (2014). Radical Design Groups. [online] Available at: http://www.historyofdesign.org/styles-genres-periods/radical-design-groups/ [Accessed 9 April 2016].

 History of Design. (2016). Radical Design Groups. [online] Available at: http://www.historyofdesign.org/radical-design-groups/ [Accessed 9 April 2016].

Centro Studi Poltronova. (2016). Cover – Centro Studi Poltronova. [online] Available at: http://www.centrostudipoltronova.it/?page=1 [Accessed 9 April 2016].

Technologystudent.com. (2016). INTRODUCTION TO STUDIO ALCHIMIA. [online] Available at: http://www.technologystudent.com/prddes1/studio1.html [Accessed 9 April 2016].

History of Design. (2014). Studio Alchymia. [online] Available at: http://www.historyofdesign.org/styles-genres-periods/postmodernism-postmodern-design/studio-alchimia/ [Accessed 9 April 2016].