SIXTIES DESING (H/B) - PHILIPPE GARNER

In January 1967 the Italian magazine Domus published a series of snapshots by Ettore Sottsass Jr. In a feature entitled "Memoires di panna montata" ("Whipped cream memoirs") he presented the results of a visual note-taking in London the previous October. Sottsass was fascinated by the atmosphere and specifically the graphics of London's popular culture. He had photographed the boutiques, their interiors, window displays and signs, the graffiti, the painted or neon visual language of a vibrant counter-culture. Amidst such logos as "Pacesetters", "Palisades" and "Male West One", he found a new world which had turned its back on "the little black dress and the string of cultured pearls, and had also finished with the Swiss-Dutch approach". Sottsass had identified the signals of the defining Zeitgeist of the Sixties. The following year, 1968, saw the completion of Mies van der Rohe's last great project, his National Gallery building in Berlin. This project distilled the sublime essence of the Mies philosophy. It was composed on a cube grid, much of which was underground. The visible facades were minimalist compositions - walls of glass contained within a finely disciplined frame of strict horizontals and verticals. Mies gave Germany a monument to the International Style. His brand of purism had its origins in his Bauhaus years, but had lost sight of the school's founding ideals. The original utopianism of the Bauhaus had been eroded by the temptations of corporate America. The International Style emerged as the post-war torch-bearer of the Modern Movement but in a new guise, with the emphasis on formal values, and by the early Sixties was a crucial influence in all areas of design. [...] (From the publisher)