CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/28/2014

1968: Radical Italian Furniture

In her preface to 1968: Radical Italian Furniture, the super sexy new board book documenting the Dakis Joannou furniture collection, design curator and journalist Maria Cristina Didero writes, "1968 was a year to remember. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Yuri Gagarin died in an airplane crash, Russian troops invaded the former Czechoslovakia, the first interracial kiss in the history of American television took place in an episode of Star Trek, the Apollo 8 mission returned safely to Earth, and Marcel Duchamp played his last game of chess and died. But large parts of the world – Italy, France and Europe in general, but also Mexico City, California, and elsewhere – were shaken by a major social, political, and cultural movement with the potential to change the way we live forever. With regards to design, 1968 was also a year to remember as the so-called 'avant-gardes' translated this Cultural Revolution into a new language of form and sensibility, often defined as Radical Design." Featured image, by Maurizio Cattelan and Pieropaolo Ferrari of Toilet Paper, is Ettore Sottsass's 1970 mirror, "Ultrafragola."