The Open BoxAchille Castiglioni and the Architecture of Television

Abstract

This chapter explores the exhibition design and architecture that Achille Castiglioni completed in the 1950s and 1960s for the Italian television network RAI. The author demonstrates how these projects adumbrate the elements of a design culture uniquely suited to the speed and rapid change of the television medium. She explicates the work of Castiglioni in relation to the contemporaneous discussion of media by semiotician Umberto Eco. Castiglioni’s television sets were just some of the many objects he designed to fill a well-appointed interior. Yet his way of working and thinking about design in the era of information also laid the foundation for developing a radically social and participatory understanding of the end user, one that ultimately made it possible to assign architecture new forms of value, even in the context of consumer society. The most acute transformations to architecture in the era of television did not result in a reconfigured window or facilitate the domestication of a new optical toy replete with reality effects, although both of those things certainly took place. Instead, television triggered a wave of thinking about the emergence of a communications environment that recalibrated the speed, recalculated the membership, and redefined the “nature” of architecture as a world space and an open work.