Lissone – 1973 [RE]CRITICAL PROPOSALS

For over fifty years Lissone has been acclaimed for its International Painting Award, but however recent the history of the Lissone Design Award is, in reality its roots must be traced back in time: in fact, it dates back to 1936 first edition of the Settimane Lissonesi whose programming will be resumed after the Second World War alongside the National Conferences of Architects, Interior Designers and Furniture Technicians which received a large echo between the Fifties and Seventies.
These two initiatives spread the name of the Brianza town internationally, and from then on Lissone became synonymous with "furniture" (as attested by the exhibitions that the Settimane Lissonesi dedicated to the furnished house in 1959, to the New furniture for the house today in 1965 and the House of the Seventies in 1970).

If in 2015 the MAC paid homage to the thirtieth anniversary of Le Affinità Elettive, now is the time to rediscover and celebrate another important initiative which in 1973 had combined the inventiveness of architects with the expertise of Lissonese craftsmen. As a result of the struggles of the workers' movement and the awareness of the community, Alberto Salvati and Ambrogio Tresoldi set up the exhibition Critical proposals for 6 IACP lodgings at the Centro del Mobile in Lissone. Encouraging new intervention strategies within residential housing, Salvati and Tresoldi set up housing cells that had to satisfy a real need, equally influencing the transformation and evolution of the domestic habitat. With respect to the pre-established environments of public building and the fixed schemes of conventional furniture, about ten architects created prototypes that reflected an organic design of the living spaces.

Indulging industrial processes to the detriment of artisanal ones, Frederik Fogh and Luigi Caramella had devised modular furnishings freed from the "anxiety for formal novelty" that characterized the production of the time. Jonathan De Pas, Donato D'Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi had also wondered about the problem of functionality and cost reduction, who conceived of furnishings that could be consumed and fixed (like any object of common use ). If Roberto Barbieri and Lella Montecroci had tried to solve the difficult relationship between space and furniture in an ergonomic way, Giot-to Stoppino had committed himself to breaking down the bourgeois prejudice that considered the house "as a status symbol". Much more subversive were instead the proposals conceived by Nanda Vigo and Ugo La Pietra. Vigo had in fact studied the problem of the single individual and of the family nucleus from both a social and aesthetic point of view, anticipating an immersion in color and context. On the contrary, Ugo La Pietra had contested the pre-established solutions by proposing "basic structures" that left the individual the freedom to act in total autonomy (his project was awarded the Prize of the City of Lissone and the Golden Compass).

Those "proposals" are now re-presented in the form of projects together with other archival materials, because it is in the wake of this important story that the sixth edition of the Lissone Design Award must be considered, which in December will celebrate its first ten years of life.

Lissone (MB), Museum of Contemporary Art – MAC Level 1
22 April - 14 May 2017