Collapse to Expand: Alessi's Tea and Coffee Piazza

Merging threads of the expanded field, audience/public and aesthetic practice,this paper examines two strains of postmodern architecture – aestheticautonomy and capitalist commodification – proposing an interdependentand complicit relationship, through study of a movement in the early 80’sthat has been largely overshadowed by exploration of late modern experiments.In 1979, Alessi initiated a design program, Tea and Coffee Piazza,with eleven architects from around the world, marking the genesis of a numberof mass-produced products and programs specifically targeting architects,and signifying the production of small-scale industrial design objectsby architects including Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi that ran concurrentwith the design of large-scale commercial projects.Tafuri’s autonomous ‘retreat,’ as evidenced in the Alessi program, is a newaesthetic labor moving seamlessly from the back room of the studio to theglobal stage of financial capital and mass culture. Tea and Coffee Piazzaforms a critical hinge in the move from the post-modern to the industrial,from art object to mass-produced consumer product. Increased productionparalleled a geographic expansion of a more generalized design approach innorthern Italy to the world at large, utilizing apparatuses including the MaxProtetch gallery, for distribution, and MOMA, to spread ideas and influencethrough the all-encompassing design department.Through the program, and concurrent with Philip Johnson on the cover ofTime holding AT&T like a toy, branding entered architecture. The expandedfield is a politics of consumer culture in addition to practice, a mechanismby which architecture reaches a public audience and is witnessed in theglobal commercialization of derivations of the limited-production tea sets.Beyond branding, the program illustrates changes in practice including a resurgenceof typological thinking and the collapse of scale into a more manageableand easily distributed product illustrating design ideas and approach. Thetea set is “scaleless and without reference to a physical site; it reads as anahistorical representation of an authored idea.” Alessi facilitated design investigationfree of political engagement. Within the teapot there is a collapse ofmonument and domestic object, an urbanization of the house and the domesticationof the city that begins with the title and carries through product form.Looking specifically at Aldo Rossi, the program allowed a more accurateconveyance and investigation of the ideas with which he grappled and extendeda line of work that started with projects like the Teatrino Scientificoand Teatro del Mondo. The tea set collapses ideas of form, event, type, theater,memory, scale and function, into a toy. The teapot, with tenuous function,operates as an image that travels across time, culture and locale for thepurposes of evoking memory. The tea set merged model tool with art object.The Alessi program falls within the last chapter of the relationship betweenarchitects and industrial design toward global distribution and mass production,from the closing of the Bauhaus and opening of the MoMA design department(1933-34) to Michael Graves for Target (1998). The story beginswith architects like James Watt in the Industrial Revolution.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1