The Space Race and Its Effect on Design

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. It was the most watched event in television history to that point. For designers working in the late 1960s, it was confirmation that the future they had been imagining was real.

The space race had been building for over a decade before that. Sputnik launched in 1957. Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in 1961. Each event produced a wave of popular fascination with technology, with speed, with the idea that human beings could leave the planet and survive. Science fiction stopped feeling like fantasy and started feeling like journalism.

Design absorbed this in the most direct way possible. If the future was round capsules and white suits and weightlessness, then furniture and lamps and chairs should look like that too. Not as illustration. As genuine belief that the world was changing and objects should change with it.

The influence ran in several directions at once. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, showed interiors that looked designed. Clean, white, curved. The film borrowed from design and design borrowed back from the film. Pop art contributed its flat colors and its willingness to treat mass culture as worthy material. The counterculture added a different energy, less corporate, more psychedelic. All of it fed into what designers were producing.

The Space Age in design was short. By the mid 1970s the oil crisis, recession, and a general sobering of mood had ended the optimism that made it possible. What was produced in that fifteen-year window is now among the most visually distinctive design of the 20th century.

What Space Age Design Looks Like

The shapes are round and bulbous. Spheres, ovoids, capsules. Sharp corners are almost entirely absent. A Space Age lamp does not have edges. It has a continuous surface that wraps around itself. A Space Age chair encloses the sitter rather than supporting them from below.

The materials are new. ABS plastic and fiberglass allowed forms that no previous material could hold. Acrylic gave transparency with color. Foam could be molded into shapes that springs and stuffing could never achieve. These were not compromises or substitutes. They were the point. The newness of the material was part of the meaning of the object.

Color is bold and specific. White is dominant, the white of space suits and laboratory walls. But orange, red, yellow, and hot pink appear with the same confidence. These are not decorative colors. They are signals. They say that the object belongs to now, not to the past.

There is humor in the best pieces. Not the literary irony of Memphis, which came later, but a lighter touch. A lamp shaped like a mushroom. A chair that looks like a throne from a science fiction film. A hanging globe that could be a planet or a disco ball or both. The designers were enjoying themselves. You can feel it.

Scale is often unexpected. Space Age pieces are sometimes very large and sometimes very small. A giant spherical chair that a person can sit inside. A tiny acrylic table that almost disappears. The relationship between the object and the human body is deliberately played with.

How It Looks in an Interior

Space Age pieces are conversation objects. One is usually enough.

A single white spherical pendant lamp in an otherwise plain room does everything. It introduces a shape that nothing else in the room repeats. It creates a focal point without demanding that everything else organize around it. It is also genuinely good at lighting a table or a reading area.

The pieces work best against neutral backgrounds. White walls, pale stone floors, unobtrusive furniture around them. The Space Age object is the one that speaks. Everything else should listen.

Color needs care. If the piece is orange or red, the room around it should be quiet. A bright Space Age lamp against a busy wallpaper or in a room already full of pattern loses its force. Against white or grey it holds.

Mixing with contemporary furniture works better than mixing with other vintage periods. A Space Age globe lamp over a current dining table reads as considered. The same lamp over an antique dining table reads as accidental.

The retro-futurist quality of these pieces is now strong enough that they carry a sense of period. That is not a problem. It is part of what makes them interesting. But it does mean that one piece reads as a reference and five pieces read as a costume. Restraint is the discipline here more than anywhere else in Italian design collecting.

How Space Age Design Came to Italy

Italy was ready for Space Age design before the rest of the world understood what it was. The reason is plastic.

Italian manufacturers, above all Kartell, had been working seriously with injection-molded plastic since the early 1950s. By the time Space Age forms arrived in the mid 1960s, the production infrastructure was already in place. Where designers in other countries had to fight with manufacturers to attempt new forms, Italian designers had manufacturers who were actively asking for them.

Kartell's relationship with its designers was unusually close. The company understood that its identity was inseparable from the quality of its design commissions. This created a culture of genuine ambition. Designers were not adapting their ideas to existing production constraints. They were designing objects and the production methods were developed to make them.

Joe Colombo was the clearest expression of this period, as he had been in Italian Modern. But his Space Age work went further than furniture. He was designing total environments. The Visiona installation he created for Bayer in Cologne in 1969 showed a complete living space of the future. Everything integrated. Furniture, storage, lighting, sleeping areas. It looked like the inside of a spacecraft and it was entirely habitable.

Poltronova, based in Tuscany, produced some of the most radical furniture of the period. Their relationship with designers including Ettore Sottsass gave them a reputation for objects that pushed beyond what most manufacturers would attempt.

Gufram worked at a similar edge. Their Pratone chair, a seat made from oversized blades of grass in polyurethane foam, is among the most extreme objects of the period. It is also surprisingly comfortable.

The radical design movements of the late 1960s, Archizoom and Superstudio in Florence, Gruppo Strum in Turin, fed into the commercial production of the period without being fully absorbed by it. Their ideas about what design could say and do raised the level of ambition across the industry.

Key Designers, Manufacturers, and Iconic Pieces

Joe Colombo produced his most visionary work in this period. The Universale chair, already mentioned in the previous post, belongs to both Italian Modern and Space Age depending on how you look at it. More purely Space Age is his Tube chair for Flexform, designed in 1969. Four cylinders of different diameters that assemble into a seating unit. Packed flat, assembled on site. It looks like a prop from a science fiction film and functions as a real chair.

Ettore Sottsass in his early career produced objects with a spiritual dimension that sits oddly alongside Space Age optimism but makes sense in context. His Superbox cabinets for Poltronova, designed in 1966, are large laminate pieces in bold colors with an almost totemic quality. They are not Space Age in the capsule sense but they belong to the same moment of willingness to take risks with form and material.

Pierre Cardin moved from fashion into furniture in the late 1960s and his pieces have the same theatrical quality as his clothing. Large geometric forms, bold colors. Cardin furniture is less well known than his fashion work but it is among the most visually striking of the period.

Kartell produced the Universale chair, the Componibili storage unit designed by Anna Castelli Ferrieri in 1969, and dozens of other pieces that are now part of design history. The Componibili in particular is still in production and original examples are distinguishable from current production by material and construction details.

Poltronova produced Sottsass's Superbox and other significant pieces from the radical end of the period. Their archive is well documented.

Gufram occupies its own category. Their pieces, produced in small numbers in polyurethane foam, are among the most collected Italian objects of the period. The Bocca sofa, designed by Studio 65 in 1970 in the form of a pair of lips, appears regularly at major auction houses and has held value well.

The Bobino lamp by Goffredo Reggiani, a globe of white opaline glass on a slim stem, is one of the period's most recognizable objects. Original examples are still findable at fair prices compared to the major names.