Jeffrey Schnapp on what we can still learn from Bruno Munari
With the new English translation Munari's 1977 book Fantasy, we talk to the fellow polymath about process, creativity, and imagination.
My introduction to Bruno Munari is probably like many of you. Almost twenty years ago, as a design student, I picked up a copy of his 1966 book Design as Art as I started getting interested in design writing. Over the years, my exposure to Munari changed: I saw his children’s books, I read David Reinfurt’s writing on the Tetracono, I saw his useless machines. Munari was — and is — hard for me to classify despite feeling like a touchstone in my own design intellectual development.
So I was excited to see Inventory Press was releasing a new translation of a Munari book I was unfamiliar with. Originally published in 1977, Fantasy Munari explores his interests in play, imagination, and process in an idiosyncratic and personal narrative. The book was translated by another former guest of Scratching the Surface, Jeffrey Schnapp (episode 109), a Munari scholar and fellow polymath. I caught up with Schnapp to talk about the new book, his own relationship to Munari’s work, and what we can still learn from Munari’s wide-ranging work today.
This is an oversimplification but I think for many people, when they think of Bruno Munari, they think either of his children’s books or his popular 1966 book Design as Art. As I was reading Fantasy for the first time, it felt almost like a bridge between these two sides, blending the theoretical writing of Design as Art with the playful imagination of his children’s books. How do you situate Fantasy in his larger body of work? Can you give me some context for when and where this book came from?
Fantasy does, indeed, appear on the heels of a major shift in Munari’s trajectory from design as art to design education. The beginnings of this transition can be traced back to an invitation to teach at Harvard University during the spring semester of 1967 extended by Mirko Basaldella, the Sardinian painter-sculptor who was the chair of the Design Workshop at the Carpenter Center for the Arts. The visit is exhaustively documented in the volume that was the direct result of his Harvard sojourn, Design and Visual Communication (1968) but it matures during the next decade as he dedicated himself to developing alternatives to conventional forms of art education in the form of workshops for children that hinged on the principle of participatory, hands-on experiences with processes of making, often using unconventional tools such as photocopy machines and staplers. Fantasy arrives right at the pivot point, just as the “Munari method laboratories” are set to take off.