The new faces of “Domus”

A graphic project between photography and visual arts

Abstract

The editorship of the architectural magazine “Domus” was entrusted in July 1979 to Alessandro Mendini, after the death of its founder Gio Ponti. Looking at the first initiatives of the new director – an architect, designer and theorist – it’s possible to notice the desire to take the periodical towards new areas, collateral to architecture, while opening up to different cultures and giving more and more visibility to new formal research. This masterplan included a strong connection with the identity of “Domus”, deeply rooted into Italian design culture, while eliminating hierarchies between differents disciplines, such as product design, visual arts and fashion. To communicate this radical change, Mendini chooses an historic collaborator of “Domus”, Ettore Sottsass jr., asking him to imagine a new graphic design project for the magazine. Sottsass, back from a period of profound rethinking around his practice, reconnected with Mendini, with whom he had shared experiences through avant-gardes, media, languages and disciplines, such as the exhibition Italy: the new domestic landscape at the MoMA, New York, and the experience of Studio Alchimia. Among the collaborators Occhiomagico – an alias of Giancarlo Maiocchi – stands out: during those years he experimented in the multimedia arr, starting from a rethinking of the photographic language, contaminating it with surrealist, metaphysical and psychedelic influences. Studying the archives of Ettore Sottsass, and in particular the almost totally unpublished funds preserved at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venezia, this article aims to investigate the graphic design projects and to reconstruct and recontextualize a fundamental event in the history of relationships and exchanges between disciplines and languages in twentieth- century Italian culture.