The exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972, was one of the most seminal shows in the field of design. Conceived by curator Emilio Ambasz, it introduced a group of Italian thinkers, designers, and architects to the American intelligentsia that would later be assembled under the moniker Radical Design. Among the best-known creatives featured in the show were Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio, and Gaetano Pesce; all of whom were united in disavowing Modernist ideals as well as questioning the possibility of utopian thinking through design. A quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novella The Little Prince introduced the exhibition’s catalogue, hinting that utopia had to be rethought from the domestic cell by transforming the social institution most resistant to change—the family.
MARXISTS DO IT BETTER
The 1972 exhibition was not a unified movement built around a political or aesthetic manifesto, though its participants did share a mutual allergy toward the blooming
