Custom-built. The concept of unique in Italian design. Catalogo della mostra (Milan, 8 April-13 July 2003)

An inquiry into the origins of Italian design through those craft prototypes of the Thirties and Forties
which foreshadow future mass production, even though they are still a long way from defining a model
of production of quality objects for the widest possible range of users and for an effective mass con-sumption.
All pieces reproduced are ”original”. Nothing has been rebuilt. Scored by the years and by
use, they transmit the idea of absolute contem-poraneity
but also inevitable obsolescence.
There is, in each of these, something which
regards us but which no longer belongs to us:
the dream of a form of comfort which works on
volumes and bends materials in the search for
perfect ergonomics but which does not yet
accept the risk and vertigo of laying itself bare to
an authentically social use, the unresolved oscil-lation
between the workshop where they are
created and the factory towards which they are
headed. And it is precisely this contradiction
which make them signs and episodes exempla-ry
of the tortuous way in which Italian industry
and the whole of Italian society has elaborated
its ineluctable relationship with modernity.