ART & DESIGN ON THE EDGE The Last Radical They were young, mad and on a revolutionary mission. For one of them, the battle for the soul of design is far from finished. By LEE MARSHALL F rom outside, you wouldn’t give Lapo Binazzi’s ground-floor studio on Florence’s Via dei Macci, not far from the great Franciscan church of Santa Croce, a second glance. On this side street of modest, shuttered townhouses, it looks like just another small artisan’s workshop. But for many years it has been the workspace, and think-space, of a man described by Evan Snyderman – a cofounder of New York gallery R & Company, which held a retrospective of his major works that ended in November – as “the truest Radical of all the Radicals”. That’s Radical as in Radical Design, an Italian movement of the late 1960s that was particularly active in Florence, where three of its main groups – Superstudio, Gruppo 9999 and UFO – were based. The Radicals sought to question established codes of Rationalist architecture and design while taking counterculture potshots at consumerism, imperialism and other such fashionable targets. The objects they produced were often intended as sardonic, temporary provocations, like UFO’s Urboeffimeri polyethylene inflatables, one of them a giant missile in the shape of a toothpaste tube that the group carried on an anti–Vietnam War demonstration in 1968. Down one side of the floppy rocket ran a slogan (in Italian): “Colgate with Vietcong”. Binazzi was born in 1943 and came from an artistic family. His mother was a painter, his father a classically trained clarinetist and alto saxophonist whose repertoire ranged from jazz to Chopin and beyond. On free days he would often take Binazzi to one or another of Florence’s many museums. Initially drawn to creative writing but also gifted in maths, Binazzi was particularly influenced by his thesis adviser at the architecture school of the University of Florence, Umberto Eco, who taught semiotics there from 1965 to 1971 (and would go on to become a renowned novelist). Binazzi founded UFO in 1967 with five fellow students. Roused by Eco’s Lapo Binazzi, now 73, was an original member of Italy’s Radical Design movement of the late 1960s. He continues to defy convention, seen here brandishing his 2009 wood-and- Plexiglas Knife lamp teachings, they aimed, he says, to create objects that “mixed up the signifier and the signified” and caused “a kind of semantic fission, a chain reaction of meaning”. They were also reacting against the era’s prevailing modernist dogmas, as the spry 73-year-old points out: “We wanted to operate outside the logic of industrial design, and outside of its moral perspective, which was all about the greatest good for the greatest number – a social democratic vision which would lead to minimalism and globalisation.” In reaction to the long tradition of pared-back functionalism inaugurated by the Bauhaus, and inspired by the American Pop Art movement, the Radicals aimed, Binazzi says, to “bring back figurative elements”, decoration and PHOTO MAURIZIO DI IORIO 78 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
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