15. Design in the Sixties: Organization of the Sector, Pedagogy, Industry and Dissemination

The field of design developed solidly in the Catalan context during the 1960s. There was an existing fertile tradition of production and associations, although it had faced multiple historical setbacks and difficulties in consolidation. 

This development can be seen in four simultaneous but clearly differentiated areas, which characterize the evolution of the discipline throughout the period. On the one hand, there is what we could call an attempt at organizing within the sector, exemplified by the founding of the ADI-FAD (Industrial Designers’ Association) in 1960, building on the precedent of the IDIB (Industrial Design Institute of Barcelona), which was established in 1957, and the ADG-FAD (Association of Art Directors and Graphic Designers) in 1961. Both entities were registered with the FAD (now called Fostering Arts and Design), an association initiated by artisans and architects in 1903. In 1958, the FAD Awards for Architecture and Interior Design were created; in 1961, the Delta Awards for Product Design began to be held, inspired by the Italian Delta Awards given out in Milan; and, in 1964, the first Laus Awards for Graphic Design and Visual Communication took place. At the same time, the field of design in Barcelona actively participated in the construction of associative networks on an international scale. The ADI-FAD, for example, was accepted as a member of the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) during its second assembly, which took place in Venice in 1961; André Ricard was elected vice president of the ICSID during its third conference in Paris, in 1962; and during that same year, the ADG-FAD participated in the creation of the ICOGRADA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) in London. Additionally, an important development took place in the field of pedagogy, the main consequence of which was the birth of Elisava in 1961, the first design school in Spain, and then EINA in 1967, which emerged as the result of an ideological split from the former. Likewise, there were a series of business initiatives in which design played a leading role in the industrial mechanics. Three paradigmatic cases are: the Geigy pharmaceutical laboratories, where Yves Zimmermann served as art director beginning in 1961 and where the employees included the designer Toni Miserachs, among others; the corporate publications released by the printing company Industrias Gráficas Francisco Casamajó, also under the direction of Zimmermann beginning in 1966; and, finally, the GRIS store (1969) founded by the designers Carles Riart and José Juan Bigas Luna. Finally, throughout the decade, there was an ongoing task of disseminating and communicating design from very diverse approaches and formats, spanning everything from architecture and interior design magazines to product catalogues and materials for trade fairs. Due to their singular nature, we have included in this section the writings by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán for the magazine Hogares modernos under the pseudonym Jack el Decorador [Jack the Decorator] (1969-1972), which offer a sort of sociological report on a Barcelona that was leaning into new urban and consumer rituals.

In the field of architecture, it was evident how design was entering the realm of joint theoretical reflection. Examples include issue number 43 of Cuadernos de arquitectura (1961), which included three articles by André Ricard, Santiago Pey and Rafael Marquina inviting architects to rethink the discipline; or the texts “Diseñar para un público o contra un público” [Designing for an Audience or against an Audience” by Oriol Bohigas, in issue number 45 (1961) of the same magazine, and “El culto al objeto” [The Cult of the Object] by Antoni de Moragas, in issue number 46 (1961), in which two seminal authors from the 1950s took the reins in writing essays on design, confronting the theorists of the younger generation. At the helm of Cuadernos de arquitectura, between 1961 and 1966 Pey and Marquina launched a real challenge to the so-called “artisanal inertia”, in pursuit of a recognition of design as an autonomous, professionalized and industrial practice.