Joe Colombo, Total Furnishing Unit (1971)
“The possibilities presented by the extraordinary development of audiovisual processes are enormous…… Distances will no longer have much importance; no longer will there be any justification for the ‘megalopolis’….Furnishings will disappear…the habitat will be everywhere… Now, if the elements necessary to human existence could be planned with the sole requirements of maneuverability and flexibility…, then we would create an inhabitable system that could be adapted to any situation in space and time…” Joe Colombo
Joe Colombo (1930-1971) was one of the most radical Italian industrial designer, indeed. In the years after he studied at Brera Academy of Fine Art (following classes of painting and sculpture) he became part of the avant-garde scene of the “Nuclear Movement” of painters who sought after a new artistic inspiration in the 1950′s anxiety for the atomic bomb. His forthcoming interest in the design for the future was already latent in his early sketches of “nuclear cities”, with space shuttles airways and subterranean metropolis with layers for storage, transportation and living. Despite his outrageous visions he was a prolific product designer and an architect during all his life, with many realizations in the domain of commercial furnitures and appliances. His aesthetics built on the theory that “we will have to make the home live for us, for our needs, for a new way of living more consistent with the reality of today and tomorrow.”
Plastic was his material of choice: in the 70′s he started designing self-contained plastic units providing all the services of a room. A new society was born, “habits change, the interior of rooms has to change with them.” A new kind of domestic living has to be carried out accordingly : “all the objects needed in a house should be integrated with the usable spaces; hence, they no longer have to be called furnishings but ‘equipment.’”
The two best examples of these “dynamic pieces of furniture” were the 1963 “Mini-kitchen” and the 1971 “Total Furnishing Unit”, presented at the seminal 1972 Moma exhibition “Italy, the new domestic landscape“, and which breaks domestic living into a simple set of functions carried out within a modular Kitchen, Cupboard, Bed and Bathroom.
Instead of individual pieces of furniture, these objects constituted entire seamless environments for living, completely “autonomous, independent of (their) architectural container, and that can be coordinated and programmed to adapt in any spatial situation, in the present or future.”
In the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel began making art in response to her own surroundings and daily routines, creating functional objects that fulfilled the artist’s needs relating to shelter, food, furniture, and clothing. She produced her first “Living Unit”--an experimental structure intended to reduce everything necessary for living into a simple, compact system—as a means of facilitating basic activities within her 200-square-foot (19 m2) Brooklyn storefront apartment. In order to make customized “Living Units” and other usable artworks available to contemporary consumers, Zittel launched the one-woman corporation, A-Z Administrative Services. While some of her modernist-inspired products were designed with the intention of making daily routines easy and efficient, others, such as the pod-like “Escape Vehicles,” appealed to fantasies of isolating oneself from the outside world.
By 2000, Zittel's ongoing project had been relocated from Brooklyn NY to a 25-acre (100,000 m2) parcel in the California desert. At “A-Z West” she continued an investigation into contemporary perceptions of freedom and personal liberation. The original pioneering spirit of the "frontier" considered autonomy and self-sufficiency as prerequisites of personal freedom. Zittel wanted to explore how perceptions of freedom have been re-adapted for contemporary living. It was her theory that personal liberation "is now achieved through individual attempts to slip between the cracks". Instead of building big ranches and permanent homesteads, today's independence seekers prefer small portable structures, which evade the regulatory control of bureaucratic restrictions such as building and safety codes. Much of her work reflects qualities that she feels create independence for the owner and user such as compactness, adaptability and transportability. Zittel found that despite moving to the desert to be alone, she ended up doing many social and public projects. At the core of the project, she found that she had always wanted to start a commune, but couldn't find others to join her until then.
Kisho Kurokawa - Nakagin Capsule Tower
The Nakagin Capsule Tower is a mixed-use residential and office tower designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa and located in Shimbashi, Tokyo, Japan.
Completed in 1972, the building is a rare remaining example of Japanese Metabolism, an architectural movement emblematic of Japan's postwar cultural resurgence. The building was the world's first example of capsule architecture built for permanent and practical use. The building still exists but has fallen into disrepair.As of October 2012, around thirty of the 140 capsules remained in use as apartments, while others were used for storage or office space, or simply abandoned and allowed to deteriorate.
Opposing its slated demolition, Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times, described Nakagin Capsule Tower as "gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values."
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