Archive Newsletter No. 6.1
February 2019
In the exhibition Die Utopie des Designs (The Utopia of Design), which was on view at Kunstverein München from 11 March to 24 April 1994, the focus was on changes in everyday life in the 1960s and 1970s, which also fundamentally changed the social field of art.
The exhibition was conceived by Helmut Draxler and developed with a group of students at the Art Academy, including Amelie von Wulffen, Thomas Eggerer, Jochen Klein, Florian Hüttner, Undine Golberg, and Josef Kramhöller.
The aim of the exhibition organizers was to present a historically comprehensive interpretation that perceives local structures as phenomena of global change and integrates them into the interdisciplinary context of design, architecture, urbanism and art.
The term utopia
At the beginning of the 1990s, the term "utopia", which entitled the exhibition, returned to a heightened relevance due to massive political changes and a "Realpolitik".
The exhibition was devoted to the concept of utopia, as applied in various approaches to design, art, architecture and urbanism in the 1960s and 1970s. It was divided into abstract utopias of the 1960s, concrete realizations of the early 1970s, and expanded design which finally led to differentiated corporate identity.
The utopias of that time were mostly urban utopias composed of technological and social utopias. The prerequisite for this, however, was not economic decline, but a boom secured by economic policy. In addition to technological and constructive innovations, this was responsible for the fact that it was not utopias of hope that were conceived, but utopias of what was feasible in the near future. This was accompanied by political movements that often equated this feasibility with social change.
Design was now held responsible for helping to shape social changes. At the same time, it was intended to control and adapt them. The potential for conflict, which was to become the main theme of the exhibition, is already evident here.
According to former Kunstverein München director Helmut Draxler, "The utopia of design that Italian, British, Scandinavian and Austrian designers of the 1960s created in their departure from the rigorously functionalist ideals of the time before (with the HfG in Ulm as their theoretical center) means not only utopian design as a genre-specific category, but also the design that utopias generally preserve when they are visualized and finally concretized.” [1]
Home Design
The utopias of the 1960s were ushered in with the founding of the architecture group Archigram (1961), the works of Hans Hollein and Raimund Abraham, as well as, among others, the Japanese metabolists.
They were mostly produced by collectives who were involved in the discourse of technology, new plastic materials, and new marketing strategies.
A departure from the classical object towards the design of situations is evident, as is a close connection with architecture and urbanism. The entire living environment was to be redesigned. The development at Superstudio from "Evasion Design" [2] (1968) via "Radical Architecture" [3] (1970) to the group "Global Tools" [4] (1973) is therefore no coincidence.
Since the first "Visiona" [5] at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1968, a new concept of design had become socially acceptable. For Joe Colombo (1930 – 1971) and Verner Panton (1926 – 1998), the close connection between design utopia and technical and economic innovations (plastics) cannot be overlooked. In the 1st floor of Kunstverein München, Panton's living landscapes were exhibited as well as seating furniture by Colombo, designed from 1967 to 1969, and seating groups by Superstudio and Archizoom.
In many architectural utopias, the fascination with technology was accompanied by a conservative attitude to the traditional family image. The openness of situational design in furniture can often also be seen as social conditioning. In many of Luigi Colani's (b. 1928) designs, for example, clear sexism is obvious.
Architecture
Urban space was especially disputed at that time. The architectural forms of the utopias of the 1960s were based on a structural logic that was heralded as early as 1907 by Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922) with his tetrahedron construction system, followed later by Buckminster Fuller's (1895 – 1983) geodesic domes [6] .
From the 1950s onwards, so-called "megastructures"[7] were finally created; net-like, flexible systems with which even large distances could be covered. The functional separation of living, working, leisure and traffic in urban planning seemed to be the root of all urban development evils to a younger generation of architects, which were to be overcome with the megastructures. In addition to Archigram, Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920 – 2005), and Yona Friedman (b.1923), the radical Florentine groups Superstudio and Archizoom also responded at the end of the 1960s ironically to the megastructuralists with their designs. In the exhibition Die Utopie des Designs, various architectural utopias were illustrated with drawings, photographs, and models.
Günther Domenig's (1934 – 2012) and Eilfried Huth's (b. 1930) 1963 design of a megastructure for the city of Ragnitz was also shown as a model in the exhibition. The cell-like units, which gained in importance in architecture, were inspired by the first space voyages and became more and more important for designers. Verner Panton, Joe Colombo and Marco Zanuso (1916 – 2001), for example, designed capsule-like housing units. The exhibition also showed the experimental kitchen of the Poggenpohl company, designed by Luigi Colani in 1970. The social aspect of these "living units" is interesting. It was precisely by limiting the living space that the individual free space was to be increased. At the same time, megastructures in architecture and urban planning were to make this free space subject of control again. The reasons for this also lie in an attempted response to growing population numbers and environmental destruction.
Decline
In the process of the exhibition project, the core question increasingly emerged as to how a cultural production of utopias can be related to economic processes. Attempts were made to point out contradictions that lie in the interplay between conscious references from the cultural field to the economic field and unconscious influences vice versa. [8]
Between the notions of freedom from repression (eg. the hippie life at Superstudio) and the elimination of frictional resistance for the economic system, there was such a potential for conflict that the concepts were ultimately doomed to failure.
The 1973 ecological and oil crisis heralded the immediate end of utopia production. The dissolution of the Bretton Woods Agreement, i.e. the release of fixed exchange rates in spring 1973, also contributed to this.
Social factor and discourse
Looking at the various utopian designs of those years, one cannot avoid the debates and the concept of (social) space that were shaped by Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) and Henri Lefebvre (1901 – 1991), who understood space as a social product – albeit in different ways. This also reveals overlaps in content with protest movements since the 1960s. The social function of these utopias was to advance technological and social progress, and in parts, even to replace it.
Until its date in the mid-1990s, Die Utopie des Designs can be regarded as one of the few exhibitions in the history of Kunstverein München that dealt specifically with design. Thus the question of the relationship between art and design was directly raised. This fundamental question of the history of modernism, which often culminated in a strict separation of the two areas or the abolition of borders, became the starting point for many theoreticians [9] and artists, and seems more topical than ever in today's art discourse.
The Munich Olympic site of 1972 finally marked the climax of utopian design in the exhibition at Kunstverein München. It was here that the course was set for the future of communicative and corporate design. We would like to present you these local structures, which symbolize global change, in more detail in our next newsletter.
Text: Theresa Bauernfeind
Research: Theresa Bauernfeind
Translation and Editing: Theresa Bauernfeind, Post Brothers and Christina Maria Ruederer
If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us via archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de.
[1] Helmut Draxler: Die Utopie des Designs. Ein archäologischer Führer für alle, die nicht dabei waren. In: exhibition catalog Die Utopie des Designs, Kunstverein München e.V., 1994. Translated from German by Kunstverein München e.V.
[2] „Evasion design, punning and easy overtones of political disengagement apart, is the activity of planning and operating in the field of industrial production assuming poetry and the irrational as its method, and trying to institutionalize continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by the equivocations of rationalsm and functionality. Every object has a practical function and a contemplative one: and it is the latter that evasion design is seeking to potentiate.“ (J. Ockman: Superstudio. Invention Design and Evasion Design, In: Architecture Culture 1943- 1968. NY: Rizzoli, 1993, p. 438.)
[3] A cohort of Italian architects and designers active from the late 1960s through the 1970s. They placed themselves in opposition to the rationalism and functionalism of 20th- century modernism and formed during a tumultuous period characterized by political violence and extremism, student uprisings, and social unrest.
[4] In January 1973, a gathering took place in Milan at the editorial office of the magazine Casabella, involving, among others, the architects and designers Ettore Sottsass Jr., Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Riccardo Dalisi, Remo Buti, Ugo La Pietra, Franco Raggi, Davide Mosconi, and members of the groups Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, UFO and Zziggurat. Together with the conceptual artists and intellectuals Franco Vaccari, Giuseppe Chiari, Luciano Fabro and Germano Celant, these founded Global Tools - a system of workshops that would last until 1975.
[5] From 1968 to 1972, during the Cologne Furniture Fair, the Bayer chemicals group rented a boat for excursions, which was transformed by well-known designers into a temporary exhibition space on the theme of "Living Today". The latest developments in the textile sector were presented here, with a balanced relationship between the presentation of different product groups and the self- portrayal of the processing companies.
[6] This geodesic dome was first built in 1948 during project studies at Black Mountain College together with Josef Albers.
[7] The central idea was to create a framework structure that would overlay existing cities. An essential aspect of the megastructure is the separation of the structural framework, which contains the entire urban infrastructure such as energy and water supply and transport, from the residential units, which can be integrated into and removed from the supporting structure as required. This separation should make it possible to adapt the city to the individual wishes of the inhabitants as well as to the changing social and societal conditions. Megastructures are also to be understood as an early expression of a networked imagined world; they stood for belief in progress and a spirit of optimism, the separation of structure and use for enthusiasm for technology and serial production. Among the megastructuralists, alongside Constant, Friedman, Archigram, Archizoom and Superstudio, are the English architect Cedric Price, the Japanese metabolists, but also architects such as Frei Otto. In the fall of 1964, the fifth issue of Archigram magazine with a focus on Metropolis was published in London. Under the title "Within the big structure", the Archigram design Plug-in City was presented, as were the urban visions New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys and La Ville spatiale by Yona Friedman.
At the latest since Rem Koolhaas' Metabolism Talks, megastructures have been back on the agenda of the current architectural discourse.
[8] Theory of Helmut Draxler (cf. Die Utopie des Designs. Ein archäologischer Führer für alle, die nicht dabei waren. In: exhibition catalog Die Utopie des Designs, Kunstverein München e.V., 1994.): The design views of early modernity indicate a common problem horizon in the reform of the conditions dictated by the movement of capital (e.g. the attempt to overcome the social crisis with the help of architecture). All these approaches lost their significance when capital began to reform itself at the end of the 1930s (see John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 1936) and Keynesian economic policies in Western Europe and America took on the tasks of economic and social crisis management (e.g. Roosevelt's New Deal).
If an economic policy oriented towards Keynes undermined the preconditions of urban utopias, how could the same policy provide the economic background for this kind of utopia 30 years later?
[9] E.g. Adolf Loos, Clement Greenberg et al.
Fig.:
1. Die Utopie des Designs, 1994. Installation View Kunstverein München e.V., 1994. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., Foto: Wilfried Petzi
2. Die Utopie des Designs, 1994. Installation View Kunstverein München e.V., 1994. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., Foto: Wilfried Petzi: Günther Domenig und Eilfried Huth, Entwurf einer Megastruktur für die Stadt Ragnitz, 1963.
3. Die Utopie des Designs, 1994. Installation View Kunstverein München e.V., 1994. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., Foto: Wilfried Petzi: Luigi Colani, Experimentalküche für Poggenpohl, 1970.