Marco Zanuso ITALY (1916-2001)

One of the elder statesmen of modern design, Marco Zanuso contributed to the Italian design movement in the years following World War II. Trained in architecture at the Milan Polytechnic (1935-39), he opened his own design office in 1945 and his work was marked by rigor and originality during a long, illustrious career.

Zanuso was Professor of Architecture, Design and Town Planning at the Polytechnic of Milan from 1945 to 1986, played a role in founding ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale) in 1954 and helped to organize the first post-war Triennale exhibitions in Milan. He served as editor first of Domus from 1947-1949, and then of Casabella, 1952-1956.

Zanuso's early experiments with bent metal brought him international recognition at the Low-Cost Furniture competition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1948. Further exploration of materials yielded sleek designs in plastic and upholstered furniture. Witness, for example, his breakthrough designs for Arflex, a division of Pirelli. In 1948, the company commissioned Zanuso to design its first furniture models using foam-rubber upholstery. Zanuso's Antropus chair was released in 1949, followed by the elegant Lady armchair, which took First Prize at the 1951 Milan Triennial. The chair offered not only comfort and sensual contours, but also a potential for efficiency in production previously unimaginable.

During the 1960s, Zanuso enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with the widely respected German designer, Richard Sapper. One of their first projects was a children's stacking chair for Kartell. Light, functional and manufactured in playful colors, the simple chair was among the European designs that began to transform the perception of plastic as a cheap material to an acceptance of plastic as an appropriate, even classy, material for the modern home.

Zanuso and Sapper also earned their place in design history as consultants to Brionvega, developing products that have since become icons of modern industrial design. The Doney 14 (1962) was the first completely transistorized Italian television, while the LS502 (1964) was a battery-powered portable radio that folded into a neat box. The Doney television won the prestigious Compasso d'Oro prize in 1962. Continuing their creative partnership through the 1960s and '70s, Zanuso and Sapper also designed the characteristically minimal Grillo folding telephone for Siemens (1965), as well as highly styled household products for Necchi.

Alongside his contemporaries and countrymen, Mario Bellini, Joe Colombo and Ettore Sottsass, Zanuso was one of the great Italian designers of the 20th century.
http://www.dwr.com/category/designers/v-z/marco+zanuso.do

An extended encounter with a 1950s-era Robert Rauschenberg combine set Andrew Scott Cooper on a mission to discover the truth of a sensational murder case supposedly committed by a sociopathic gang of Jewish teens who delighted in crime and violence and were suspected of being gay.

While examining Rauschenberg’s work in search of coded messages aimed at the closeted gay community, Cooper was asked to study the layered newspaper articles and photographs in Collection (1954–55). He began to suspect the work had a theme: the widespread arrest of homosexuals in major American cites, or “pink panic.” A scrap of newspaper dated August 22, 1954 stuck out, a day when the so-called Kill-for-Thrills gang made the front page.

The widely reported facts of the case claimed that the four boys savagely attacked and beat a black factory worker, then left him to drown. Though additional charges were not made against them, they were also accused of a second murder, as well as a slew of other violent crimes. As Cooper wrote in the Observer, he suspected there was more to it than that. The boys never testified in the trial, which was surrounded by hysteria. - http://news.artnet.com

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Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant. His early work was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer and, especially, by his teacher Bertrand Russell and by Gottlob Frege, who became something of a friend. This work culminated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book that Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. It claimed to solve all the major problems of philosophy and was held in especially high esteem by the anti-metaphysical logical positivists. The Tractatus is based on the idea that philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language, and it tries to show what this logic is. Wittgenstein’s later work, principally his Philosophical Investigations, shares this concern with logic and language, but takes a different, less technical, approach to philosophical problems. This book helped to inspire so-called ordinary language philosophy. This style of doing philosophy has fallen somewhat out of favor, but Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following and private language is still considered important, and his later philosophy is influential in a growing number of fields outside philosophy.

More: http://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H2