During his extensive career as an artist, designer, and pedagogue, Bruno Munari (1907–1998) created a considerable number of highly innovative works spanning from visual art and industrial design to experimental books, creative and essay writing, photography and film, and nowadays is increasingly acknowledged as one of twentieth-century Italy’s most significant and eclectic figures. This contribution focuses on the dialectics between functionality and non-functionality in Munari’s oeuvre through…
Read moreDuring his extensive career as an artist, designer, and pedagogue, Bruno Munari (1907–1998) created a considerable number of highly innovative works spanning from visual art and industrial design to experimental books, creative and essay writing, photography and film, and nowadays is increasingly acknowledged as one of twentieth-century Italy’s most significant and eclectic figures. This contribution focuses on the dialectics between functionality and non-functionality in Munari’s oeuvre through the translation semioethic analysis of some of his most iconic works: his Macchine inutili, Sculture da viaggio, Libri illeggibili, and Sedia per visite brevissime. For Munari, design should aim at the realization of the category of functional correctness, according to the principle that, in the design field, “one never judges an object as beautiful or ugly, but as right or wrong according to its functions, including its psychological function.” In parallel, he conceived his artistic works as useless objects in which the rule welcomes chance, functionality submits to gratuitousness, utility gives way to futility, and logic opens up to fantasy. Through this dialogic reversal, Munari’s artistic projects become experimental models of new educational, productive, and communicative processes, and place the aesthetic experience at the basis of social integration and the acquisition of ethical values.
