ENVIRONMENTS AND COUNTER ENVIRONMENTS

The celebrated 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art embodied a careful, analytical approach to categorization. The exhibition encountered the dynamic and complexly political Italian design context of the early seventies, which it examined and organized into a matrix of categories, differences and distinctions.

A first order of distinction separated Objects - reformist, conformist or contestatory - from Environments, themselves divided among design as postulation, design as commentary and counterdesign as postulation. In a cunning reversal the Objects section was installed in the comparatively natural environment of the sculpture garden while the Environments were placed within the more conventionally institutional space of the museum galleries. This internalizing maneuver implied that the exhibition would stage an assessment of not only these specific environments but also of “environment” as an architectural term or strategy. By 1972 “environment” had already circulated through architecture and design from across a range of disciplines and through diverse filiations, from the environmental design movement and its association with the social and behavioral sciences, to biology, cybernetics and the defense industries, through to a more current notion of environment as linked to questions of ecology. While discriminating among the various attitudes, politics and strategies of the participants the exhibition also tested the viability of the category itself, and at the same time considered the potential survival or disappearance of architecture, away from its objecthood and into an environment of perceptual relations, behavioral configurations, and “domestic rituals.”