Andrea Branzi was an Italian designer, architect and urban planner. He was also a professor of industrial design at the Milan Polytechnic. Branzi was one of the initiators of the avant-garde designer collective Archizoom Associati, founded in 1966. This pioneering collective was the breeding ground for radical design and anti-design, a counterpoint to mainstream functionalism. Their thesis was that with the spread of market capitalism, the city increasingly took on the shape of an archaic system. Architecture has lost its creative power in urban planning in favor of the consumer economy with its constantly circulating flow of goods. Through a critical utopia conceived by Archizoom Associati, control over urban space should be regained. Design played a central role as a conceptual instrument. The group joyfully attacked the boundaries of prevailing taste using new forms and materials.
