Toward Paris! 45 Years of Domus for a Design à la Français

Between 31 May and 23 September 1973, the exhibition Domus: 45 ans d’architecture design, art,1928–1873 was held in Paris. It occupied an entire floor of the Pavillon Marsan in the Louvre, involving the entire editorial staff of the magazine. The exhibition, subdivided by decades, used panels, a collection of objects, and original artworks to illustrate the history of Ponti’s magazine from its foundation to 1973. It presents different levels of interpretation that are exemplary of the way of telling the Italian design in an international framework practised since the years of the first issues of “Domus”. On the one hand, the placement of the magazine’s interests in a temporal flow, in the form archive. On the other hand, the curatorial choice clearly privileges the cotè reserved for the visual arts, both in the reproduction of articles and reviews published over the years and thanks to the extraordinary contribution of exhibited artworks by Marino Marini, Max Bill, Renato Guttuso, Ben Sahan, Chillida, Tinguely, Armand among others. The thesis of the paper is that this has been a mode of the Italian project that shapes its narrative code as a transformism calibrated to the culture and mood of the host countries with the aim of presenting a compact and coherent image (the Made in Italy, the Italian way or the Italian line depending on the situation) but also to adapt it to the foreign public, both the generalist -and possible buyer- and the specialist.