[Keywords] functionalist furniture, first avant-garde movements, Le Corbusier; GATCPAC, vernacular

[abstract]
This paper proposes a short revision of the history of design put in the context of historic avant-garde. The study of documents and original sources offers a new approach to historiography interpretations. In that sense, as far as the traditional and classical approach to the period, usually following Pevsner, has repeated and spread the same interpretation of design always pointing at the universalizing aim of any product while forgetting its belonging to a specific place. This paper proposes a new vision of the period and also will present some writings and professional proposals spread during the twenties and thirties that have been hushed up. What has been found is a stream focused on Mediterranianism and Latinism defended by Le Corbusier and spread all over through his links with Catalonia, Italy, France and Central Europe. Thus, in front of that functionalist furniture so German in spirit stand all those models which find its roots in vernacular productions of the Latin world. From that point of view, the period acquires new references which talking about a particular place suggests that there have been many aesthetic trends that inform contemporary design.

[Keywords] Aesthetics, City, Scenery, Architecture, Judgment

[abstract]
Examples discussed in this article are showing that from the late Middle Ages all through the Renaissance, there existed an idea of the city as scenery imagined as a metaphorical ground for interpreting different social and cultural values. In that context, the aesthetic categories relevant to the process of imagining the city as scenery are directly anticipating the observer’s aesthetic respond to the emotionally created character of the scenery. From the mediaeval time, urban space reflected metaphorically the regional space and its essentially performing and theatrical characteristics. More precisely, in the twelfth and thirteenth century western European literature, the city has been interpreted as an urban mirabilia, miraculous scenery of many important events. However, in the thirteenth century the city is becoming a matrix of an ideological system. It is a social urban utopia, which success depends on the coordination between the actual story and the cultural and psychological heritage of the citizens and their system of values in the context of the time. These components of experiencing beauty of the city seem to develop further into a particular ethical concept under the influence of the philosophy of humanism. This was a kind of process through which man express’ his longing for acting as necessity in creating an ambivalent world. In this world rationality and irrationality are correlated in a complex way through the form of architectural and urban scenery. Far from rationalized aspects, intuition and emotion as aesthetic values, are now interpreting the ethical bond between individual and eternal aspects of humanity.