The Future Perfect

In case you hadn't noticed, there is something of a boom occurring on the high streets of Great Britain. Buoyed by the windfall effect of building societies becoming banks, and perhaps heartened by the extended honeymoon of the Blair administration, people, we are told, are spending once again. So, the World of Leather, The Link and Dixons, the kitchen shops, the sofa workshops, Courts and MFI, the department stores and the clothes shops are enjoying the benefit of people with money to spend enjoying the effects of spending.

Now, as ever, we are defining our place in the world via the raft of goods that we consume. These treasure troves of personal belongings are, we know, just assemblies of personal effects. But with so much to choose from, those enfranchised by VISA or cash reserves can turn the individual shopathon into a rolling bricolage of aspiration, ownership and display. Consumerism, and by extension design, is oriented towards little more than the creation of distinction and difference. Perhaps it was ever the case, but these days there seems to be less on offer to pull us together as a society with our eyes firmly on the future. Where are the people who should be shaping the objects and thinking the ideas that make the future sound like a good idea?

So multifarious and multivalent is the potential for individual expression through what we purchase, that there is no consensus concerning what might constitute the perfect way to live, as expressed through the things we choose to own. We have nothing to aim at and little to aspire to, save for a sorry string of newly-built houses and a poverty of expectation concerning many of the designers who shape our world.

But, at certain points in relatively recent history there have been accidental conjunctions of thought, practice, economics and opportunities that have allowed for utopian ideas to be expressed through design. We can point to several instances of these happy accidents: Westinghouse handing the transistor to the Japanese small electrical manufacturers in the late 40s; the embargo on heavy machine engineering in Germany during the same period, which meant that companies like Bosch turned to making high-quality steel goods for kitchens and homes instead of turbines and weapons.

Equally, in Italy for a couple of decades or so following WW2, conditions were close to ideal for the business of manufacturing and consuming goods. In the atmosphere of post-war reconstruction, the sensibilities attached to the design and manufacture of goods for the home seemed to take root in the industrial zone of the north, and the means to construct the Italian dream home, and therefore a dream future, began to become a reality.

Italy's take on the meaning and importance of design to its economy, and more significantly to the quality of its population's lives, was conditioned by a number of factors that remain relevant. The family was an even stronger influence than it is today, when birth-rates are somewhat in decline. This has dual significance. Not only was the notion of setting up home, marriage and children central to the experience of living in a European, Catholic country, but that tradition had provided the north with precisely the kind of family-run, small-scale, highly flexible manufacturing base it would need to fulfil the needs of the post-war consumer.

Family names like Zanussi have today become household names, but their success was built on the fact of their ability to manufacture short-run products, virtually by hand. The signifiers of Italy's new-found desire for consumer products from the 50s onward were brought into being largely by a workforce returning from the war replete with the kind of robust artisanal skills that could respond to the embargo on large-scale, military-style engineering projects by making small things well.

Designers like Corradino D'Ascanio whose Vespa motor scooter helped to define a certain sense of modernity in terms of form, use and style relied upon the capacity of the workforce to fashion and finish the machine. Earlier models of the Vespa were, in effect, batch-produced and batch finished. There are archive photographs that show the machines laying in circles on the factory floor while the final grace notes are applied using nothing more technologically advanced than a hammer.

The effect of machines like the Vespa was as iconic as it was practical. The notion of individual transport had been at the core of the reforming zeal that motivated the Fascist states in the 30s. The irony that the true democracy of a people's transport should come about in a deeply Christian but nevertheless nominally Communistic democratic post-war society was apparently lost on those lucky enough to be in work, or luckier still to own a scooter or a tiny Dante Giacosa FIAT Cinquecento. But these products were only the thin end of the wedge in terms of Italy's soon-to-be-won status as the home of a utopian ideal expressed through design.

The process of design and manufacture of any product demands faith from the manufacturer, who must underwrite the project, and hands-on development by the designer. The proximity of the manufacturing base to the Politecnico di Milano and its architecturally-trained graduates meant that this sequence of decision making, development and manufacture could take place within a symbiotic relationship. The designers were of course anxious to make their ideas flesh, and the manufacturers had a ready and growing market for new goods for the home. Add into that mix the flexibility in manufacture of new media like ABS plastics and polymer-based materials and the once-more available staples such as plywood and high-grade steel, and the possibilities of manufacture for the future became tangible.

Companies like Kartell, Capellini, Arflex, Boffi, Tecno and Cassina could collaborate with architects and designers such as Carlo Mollino, Marco Zanuso and Osvaldo Borsani, backed up by the artisans of the suburbs of Milan and Turin. Finding itself in a position in which design for the home and for life mattered a great deal, Italy proved a breeding ground for significant thought and experimentation concerning the ideal in terms of the domestic environment and the world at large. Whilst by the mid-60s the wider theoretical orthodoxies of architectural practice and staid municipalism were being challenged by the edgy Florentine think tanks Archizoom and Superstudio, Milan had spawned its own radical thinker in the shape of Joe (Cesare) Colombo.

Born in Milan in 1930, Colombo was a polymath. Working within formal and communicative languages that dealt with the technologies and the concerns of his time, Colombo was able to measure and articulate the particular and rapidly shifting Zeitgeist of 50s and 60s Italia. Having graduated from the Politecnico di Milano, he was ideally placed to reap the fruits of the post-war resurgence of northern Italy's fortunes.

In 1954 at the Trienalle di Milano, Colombo's first public piece of work was three open-air 'rest areas' in which televisions were enshrined in their own theatre-like settings. Television, although in its infancy in Europe, was identified by Colombo as one of the nascent defining factors of domestic and public life. It was this capacity to identify and imagine the concerns of the future that set Colombo apart from his contemporaries in terms of his approach to form and meaning.

His 4860 chair of 1965 identified a similar preoccupation with the morphologies of a time yet to come. The 4860, with its one-piece, moulded ABS plastic seat and detachable, interchangeable legs was the first one-piece seat and back to be moulded in plastic. The very plasticity of these new materials meant that the designer could play with form and push the boundaries of what was acceptable in the modern home.

Colombo continually patrolled the edge of the modern, to the extent where the Spider lamp, also from 1965, the Roll chair from 1962 and the Elda armchair from 1969 add up to the components of a design language with a definitive signature. Objects such as the Rotoliving console from 1969 show a mind entirely concerned with making some future utopian domestic state a contemporary reality. Designed to rotate on a turntable in the centre of a living room, Rotoliving contained elements that turned on a vertical axis to reveal and conceal all of the requirements for civilised modern living. For Colombo this was a television, a radio and a bar. The huge and cumbersome design went beyond furniture, somehow belonging more to the plug-in ethos of component living where human needs were met by the introduction of the necessary module.

If designs like Rotoliving or the Cabriolet bed with its fold-down hood were impractical bravura statements with a touch of fantastic, Colombo demonstrated on many other occasions the deftness of touch that helped to create the modern morphology of contemporary design. The Dinner-Living table from the last year of Colombo's life, 1971 (he died aged only 41), transmuted itself from dining table to coffee table. The metal tube and melamine construction is lightweight and easily manipulated by one person.

The Mini Kitchen is also a deeply practical solution to the needs of the small house and flat dweller. In Italian cities, where it is still commonplace to remain in the family home well beyond the time when we would consider it appropriate to have flown the nest, space can be at a premium. The kitchen is a self-contained cube on castors, featuring a fridge and a cooker, storage and drawer space. The monobloc design means that when not in use the kitchen effectively disappears. By addressing the problems of effective spatial use with unitary and modular systems Colombo was cleverly bridging the gap between the ideal and the real. The formal languages that helped his products and designs to sell were at the edge of what was possible with the technologies, techniques and materials of the time. The solutions offered by the practical products were nevertheless real and considered responses to the way in which people were seen to be living. This stretches from designs for reading lamps to the most comfortable of storable and disappearing furniture, the Roll chair, which as you would expect, rolls up.

It's precisely this ability to straddle the needs of real people and those in some imagined future that makes Colombo's best work so compelling. Colombo, it seemed, refused to recognise the formal conventions of what a designer and architect should be. During his short life he created buildings - blocks of flats - painted, sculpted, made installations and designed. His drawings of future cities reveal a touchingly optimistic view of urban life in which helicopters buzz above vast arboretums, or where the entire city is made from huge globes supported on stilts. His sketch of a scheme for the Piazza Duomo in Milan features big, odd umbrellas in front of the cathedral steps. Colombo's imagination could conceive on any scale.

The large room-sets devised for magazine spreads and trade fairs survive only as photographs; documents of a vision in which nothing is out of place and everything is harmonised by the combination of clever curvilinear lines with rigorous orthogonality, smoothed over with a calming balm of architectural photography. These rooms seem to beckon us into a world where the future promised by the power of design is actually alluring.

Some feel that Colombo's formal language is little more than that: an exercise in alluring shape-shifting. But it is this quality of allure, manufactured in an atmosphere of possibility, that is somehow lacking in almost all design today. The vigorous optimism implicit in Colombo's futurescapes, in his little lights, in the geometry afforded by the manipulation of the new materials, is seldom seen in the sorry re-runs of 70s styling that permeate our contemporary design. For many designers today, there seems to be little optimism and little faith in the future and the forms, the ways of living, it may have to offer. Instead, it appears that designers prefer the stolid security of relentlessly plundering the past.