Michele (or the happiness of doing)

text by Andrea Branzi

It’s not easy for me to talk about Michele De Lucchi and his work, because to some extent our stories have often overlapped and continue to do so; in spite of age difference, we have been part of the same cultural episodes and had many of the same friends. This is why his work, so different from mine, is nevertheless very familiar, and I can see some apparently remote but still very active shared roots.

Michele, at the end of the 1960s, left Padua, where he had taken part in the founding of the situationist group Cavart, and came to complete his studies in Florence, attracted (like Marco Zanini, Dante Donegani and others) by the presence of the Florentine radical movement. He had a chance, there, to work with Superstudio, a group that was an antagonist of our Archizoom Associati. A few years later I convinced him to come to Milan, where I had moved, like many other members of the movement, and where Michele became part of the vast circle of young designers that formed around Ettore Sottsass (a movement I have defined as Sotts-art), collaborating with him at Olivetti, and later with Memphis. So these are his roots, a singular mixture of radicalism and the best product design. Michele crossed those eras in the best way, acquiring growing independence and great professional ability, to the point of taking over from Ettore at the helm of the Olivetti design division. This mixture of radicalism and design capacities should come as no surprise, because that migration that happened in the early 1970s brought the Milan design system, on the threshold of a difficult passage to the postmodern, an influx of new ideas and energies, which took form in the birth of “design primario”, Alchymia, Memphis, Domus Academy, Modo, and that whole collection of initiatives known as Nuovo Design Italiano. The professional (and commercial) successes of Michele provided, in that context, important evidence of the fact that the new Italian design was not just a minority group of anarchists, but had the aim and capacity to become a new cultural and professional player, leading the whole Italian design system, updating it and guiding it in a new phase of its history. The ex-radicals proved to be the heirs to an experimental tradition to which not only Sottsass, but also Munari or Castiglioni, belonged. Without overlooking their long history, starting in the 1960s, they knew how to renew a genetic legacy that was unique in Europe. The drawings and the little wooden houses of Michele, like his Produzione Privata, should be understood, in this sense, not as escape from professional commitment, but as an integral part of it. A veritable foundation for it, because they reflect the radical idea that design feeds on continuous research and the profession requires incessant experimentation. Architecture, like design, does not consist only in responding to the needs of clients, businesses and markets, but also in an important autonomous activity of reflection, studying new archetypes and new languages that constitute an imaginary territory for intervention in reality, just like that of real buildings and products. Today the world of design is not limited only to physical realities that can be found on the market or on streets. It also extends to a boundless media universe, composed of an iconic flow that circulates on markets of ideas, driving global innovation. These little houses of rough wood exist, then, in reality, equal to the reality of concrete houses in our cities. So it should come as no surprise that they are made with hatchets and power saws, utterly different from the subtle, sophisticated finishing of Michele’s furniture, because they do not represent a miniaturization of his projects, but an alternative, based on study of more rugged, potent archetypes. A long, noble tradition exists of wooden cabins proposed as a starting point for a new architecture; beginning with those proposed by the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s, a primitive architecture for ‘noble savages’, castaways from the era of darkness. But this is not the case of Michele. They also remind us of the research projects of Superstudio on the extra-urban material culture of the early 1970s, but that research was aimed at tracing back, in Florentine character, to the roots of an eternal modernity; and that is not the case of Michele. The reference to peasant culture has been a recurring theme in the work of the avant-gardes, starting in the 1920s with Kazimir Malevich and his Ukrainian huts, as rediscovery of the ancient archetypes overshadowed by industrial culture and bourgeois society; but that is not the case of Michele. Walter Gropius also looked to the image of the house as a place of recomposition of the subversive thrusts of the avant-gardes and their call to order; but that is not the case of Michele. In the case of Michele, in effect, we find something different, a major return to the ‘power and the happiness of doing’, directly by hand, with primordial technologies. His models are not conceptual, theoretical or educational, the are self-referential scraps of raw wood, self-sufficient, perfectly complete in all their imperfection. Refined, in their poverty; approximate, in an overly perfect world; happy, in their heaviness, in a world of overly light, unhappy projects. As William Morris wrote, in fact, the ‘happiness of the maker’ should be an important, very visible part of the project itself. As direct testimony, in an alienated universe, that a possibility does exist of being happy with one’s own work; an indispensable condition for making other people happy too. Otherwise we will have fought (and designed) in vain.