Furniture as Comrade: Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione | Hacker News Reader

Furniture as Comrade: Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione

dispatchesmag.com

61 pointsanarbadalov11 comments

The book is still published in a bilingual edition (Italian and English): https://corraini.com/it/autoprogettazione.html You can also find the PDF in many places, but do support small publishers (and a paper booklet is better in the workshop anyway).

Profesor at CMU architecture school, here. Love to see this. Our students worked on building and drawing the P, Q, R chairs designed by Mari.

By the way, http://enzomari.com/ is one of the best portfolio websites ever made imo.

First thing that came to mind: https://old.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/fwi9y6/i_made_...

Article has stunning typography, legibility, layout, ad-free.

A furniture website I love to visit is artemest.com, which sells many pieces that fit the Mari philosophy.

>sells many pieces that fit the Mari philosophy

Is it even possible to fit the philosophy with the purchase of the finished product? It feels like doing so misses the point entirely.

He did design quite a bit of mass produced furniture too.

A few years ago, I was feeling a bit burnt out on a software project and decided to set aside some time to build something physical that I could accomplish in a weekend. I ended up using my dad’s workshop to build the Autoprogettazione EFFE table. [0]

It was such an empowering experience to be able to build a designer table with my own hands, and a breath of fresh air to be working with something tangible instead of the abstract realm of software.

[0]: https://www.casatigallery.com/products/enzo-mari-table-dite-...

(edit: added link)

In a similar vein, there are the Nomadic Furniture books from the 70s.

https://archive.org/details/nomadicfurniture00henn

I don't see anything in this design approach that is inaccessible to people living in and embracing capitalism who still want to preserve in themselves a healthy humanness. People are free to manage their own desires in whatever way they choose; consumption and Jones-chasing is optional. Making an honest, useful, tangible object is both a practical and a spiritual good, and too important to be held a political hostage.

Open-source designs, by definition, exist outside of capitalism, because there is no owner of private (intellectual) property who has the ability to profit off of those designs.

Capitalists can appropriate open-source designs to make them profitable, or they can leave capitalism in order to interact with those designs. Those are the options.

The project more specifically also aims to teach people that the means of production can be theirs to own (their own hands and tools, perhaps with the exception that someone likely used capitalist enterprises to make those tools and raw materials available).

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