Radical: Italian Design Exhibition - Yale

This exhibition displays the same furniture, the same fixtures, the same artists, and the same ideas as were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston two years prior. The only difference for this exhibition is the location, the building, the exhibition's direct context. Should this matter? Should the "place" of the exhibited material interact with the exhibited material itself? Our answer is unequivocally - yes. A second iteration of the traveling Radical art exhibition, first displayed in a Mies van der Rohe building, is now housed in the Paul Rudolph fortress for the Yale School of Architecture. It is no coincidence that while Allesandro Mendini was setting fire to Monumentino da Casa halfway across the world, so too were the architecture students to their beloved home of Rudolph Hall. Although there is not a direct correlation between the two events, the exhibition and design has much to gain from their curated superimposition in 2022, from their shared socio-political contexts in the 1960s and 1970s, and from their current cultural overlaps.