Contested Games Mexico 68's Design Revolution

Get the First Look at SuperDesign: Italian Radical Design 1965-1975, a Documentary About Italy's Most Revolutionary Design Movement

At Milan's Salone del Mobile in 1971, Florentine architect Lapo Binazzi assembled polyurethane pieces into a Doric temple, queued up his sound track, and pressed play. "Our dream was to ruin the temple to the ground, to the sound of an earthquake," remembers Binazzi, now 74 and still based in Florence. The practical application of the remaining chunks of columns and pediment? Chairs and tables for college students.

Such playful destruction was a fitting metaphor for the time, as the world convulsed with student protests, worker revolts, and creative outbursts like Pop Art and rock 'n' roll. In the mid-1960s, young architecture students across Italy began channeling their revolutionary ideas into provocative furniture, interiors, artworks, and installations that challenged the prevailing less-is-more modernism and rampant consumerism of postwar Italy. While Binazzi's UFO collective, alongside Superstudio, Archizoom, and Gianni Pettena, stirred the waters in Florence, Franco Audrito of Studio 65 carried out similar ideas in Turin, where labor riots surged around the city's many factories. Art critic Germano Celant, who covered the movement in Ugo La Pietra's In magazine in 1971, awarded the extended group their official name: the Radicals.

Joe Kramm/courtesy of R & Co

Lapo Binazzi's 1971 installation for salone del mobile.

Nearly 50 years later and still as radical as ever, their designs are ripe for rediscovery. Gufram, the Italian manufacturer behind the movement's famous foam furniture, has put many of its cartoonish creations back into production, including Gruppo Strum's 1966 Pratone lounge (basically a giant patch of grass), and Studio 65's 1970 lip-shaped Bocca sofa, the latest incarnation of which—with zippered lips—has been devised by Moschino's Jeremy Scott. Collectors such as Dennis Freedman (more than 60 pieces from his trove go on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2019) and museums like New York's Met have begun scooping up vintage pieces at a breakneck pace. On November 7, New York's R & Co. gallery will unveil "SuperDesign," the first major U.S. survey—complete with a corresponding documentary and book—since MoMA's landmark 1972 exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" christened the movement Stateside.

"This work feels more relevant now than ever," says R & Co. cofounder Evan Snyderman, who has been collecting Radical design for more than 20 years and collaborated with Milan-based curator Maria Cristina Didero on the show. "Italy was a total disaster in the '60s. It seems like we're at that moment again—this apex of chaos."