15 January 2015
Ugo La Pietra, Progetto disequilibrante / Disequilibrating Design
Triennale Design Museum
A cura di Angela Rui
Milano
November 26, 2014 > February 15, 2015
Rather than anthological, the exhibition entitled “Disequilibrating Design” that the Triennale Design Museum in Milan has devoted to Ugo La Pietra is “cosmological.” A show that presents the work of a subversive of design, unraveling it like a story in which the protagonist plays a number of roles in the context of a close investigation of reality. Fundamental in La Pietra’s work is the relationship between individual and environment, dissected through multiple keys and dimensions: from the object to the function analyzed in a critical rather than formal sense. A relationship “where by environment is never meant the strictly urban or ecological factor, but the phenomenology of reality, amplifying the significance not just of the context of the design, but also of the whole emotional, anthropological and existential baggage of our being in the world,” explains the curator Angela Rui. An all-round investigator of design, La Pietra comes out of the radical period, bringing with him the salutary virus of cutting across boundaries. Over a thousand works are on display, varied in their materials and types: quotations from texts, cartoon strips, videos, artifacts, installations that bear witness to the pioneering character of many of the author’s themes of research, from ephemeral architecture to socio-urban design, from local-craft identity to crossover with modalities typical of art—above all the performance and happening. An experimentation that today takes on a significance that goes beyond the value of the historical document and embraces the open questions of a post-Fordist industrial world, connecting up the hypotheses and gambles of that time with the eagerness for a solution of our own day. A way of reflecting on crisis as an extended condition of our contemporary existence, rather than as a temporary phenomenon. A tension between alpha and omega where the role of La Pietra’s design has been and will remain to unbalance rather than to resolve.
Ugo La Pietra, Diagramma Immersione “Colpo di vento (una boccata d’ossigeno)”, 1970.
Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Il Commutatore, 1970. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Abitare è essere ovunque a casa propria, performance, Linz (Austria), 1979. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Amore Mediterraneo, 2000. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, “Libro Aperto: Territori”, realizzato nel Laboratorio Studio Ernan Design, Albissola, 2004. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, La Casa Telematica: Soggiorno, (mostra curata con Gianfranco Bettetini e Aldo Grasso), Fiera di Milano, 1982. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Tavolo giardino, 1984. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Negozio Mila Schön, Roma, 1973.
Ugo La Pietra, Credenza neoeclettica. Realizzato da LEGEND srl (Tezze sul Brenta, VI), 1988. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Casa per uno scultore, 1960. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.
Ugo La Pietra, Il Monumentalismo, 1972. Courtesy: Archivio Ugo La Pietra.