USA 1972

In the summer of 1972, Mario Bellini crossed the United States with a Hasselblad, and the resulting pictures read less like a designer's sketchbook than a candid portrait of an America already slipping into memory.

Bellini had come to New York that June for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, the MoMA exhibition where he unveiled the Kar-a-sutra, his radical space-mobile concept. When the show closed, he set off coast to coast with Francesco Binfaré and Davide Mosconi, using a MoMA safe-conduct that opened doors from Andy Warhol's studio to Hugh Hefner's mansion. He photographed Mormon Salt Lake City, the utopian desert commune of Arcosanti, and mobile-home settlements strung along Midwest roads. The images sat unused for over forty years until Humboldt Books drew on them for this Time Travel volume: 168 pages plus an inserted booklet, 136 photographs, softcover with French flaps, bilingual in Italian and English, with texts by Mario Calabresi and Gianluigi Ricuperati.

Bellini, the architect and industrial designer behind the Cab chair, the Kar-a-sutra, and decades of work for Olivetti, Cassina, and B&B Italia, rarely worked as a photographer USA 1972 shows the same restless curiosity about how people actually live that shaped his furniture and interiors.