The designer’s training: Bauhaus’ influence in Postwar Italy

As happened worldwide, also in Italy during the Sixties a lively debate about the schools and the training of designers grew up. The education of the industrial designer was the topic of a conference organized by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSD) in Bruges from 21 to 24 March 1964. Under the presidency of Misha Black, they took part, among others: John Radic (Yugoslavia), William Katavolos (US), Tomás Maldonado (Germany), Roger Tallon (France), Gino Valle (Italy). The conference discussed the question of the designer’s profession, splitted between its technological and artistic aspects. The subjects discussed in Bruges have long been addressed by Italian culture, ever since Giulio Carlo Argan published his fundamental book on Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus in 1951, and Ernesto N. Rogers spreads the theories of Gropius in the “Casabella” magazine. Specifically, this discussion was highlighted when the model of the Bauhaus school was analyzed as an example for the design schools. In the 1960s, this discussion was improved when trying to figure out if the model of the Bauhaus school could become an example for modern design schools. The occasion to rekindle the debate were the celebrations of the Bauhaus’s 50th anniversary. The great exhibition of 1968 obtained indeed a resounding success. Furthermore, in 1971 a Bauhaus Weimar exhibition held in Turin, exactly one year after the publication of a special issue of the magazine “Controspazio” dedicated to the Bauhaus. The paper aims to show the results of a broader research on the topic of the industrial designers’ training in Italy during the Sixties and Seventies, which had, as a starting point, the discussions on the Bauhaus training models opposed to those of the more technical schools and involved philosophers, art historians and the growing category of the design theorists engaged in the definition of a scientific disciplinary status such Alberto Rosselli or Tomás Maldonado.