Design as Art, Bruno Munari | Notes 3

Munari's Useless Machines

Concave-Convex Forms
pg. 164 - 'I began making these forms in 1948, and exhibited them as objects to be hung from the ceilings of restaurants and so on. The slightest movement of the air makes them turn, and if you project light on to them they throw a constantly changing shadow on to the walls and ceiling'

'These objects were a by-product of my 'useless machines', and they are too fragile and therefore not easily saleable compared with things cast in bronze and destined to sit in museums, perfectly still, for centuries.'

Munari's projection slides

Projections with Polarized Light

pg. 188 - 'This kind of projection was the result of experiments I made in 1954, in the hope of obtaining effects with changing colours. My first ninety compositions for direct projection are now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York'

pg. 190 - 'These experiments gave me a whole mass of possibilities so that now I can compose a whole changing and living world of colours and images, all within the tiny scope of a lantern-slide'

'In the Home of the Future people will be able to keep a small box containing hundreds of 'pictures' for projection'

Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects

pg. 204 - '...but we must not do this according to any rule of logic, but simply (as Hans Arp said) according to 'the rule of the moment'. We must 'feel' something that makes our hand move.