In May 1972, Gordon Matta-Clark installed an industrial container between two galleries in New York’s SoHo district. In it, he created an interior divided into three spaces and consisting of scavenged wood and discarded doors. An accompanying Super 8 mm film documented the happening: Matta-Clark and several other artists and visitors occupied the labyrinth of small rooms, which served as a multipurpose staging ground for unscripted activities and performances. Meanwhile on Fifty-Third Street, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz titled Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Nearly 200 manufactured objects such as chairs, tables, and light fixtures (categorized as “conformist,” “reformist,” or “contestatory”) were placed outdoors in the sculpture garden, while twelve commissioned “environments” were situated in the galleries.2As a curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, Ambasz was undoubtedly aware of Matta-Clark’s work, as he was of the trend among some American schools of architecture toward reframing the discipline within the expanded field of “environmental design.” As such, the simultaneity of these two events was not accidental, but rather indicative of the shifting fields of inquiry in both art and architectural production. Matta-Clark was engaged in a practice that straddled minimalism, conceptual art, and site-specific installations. Since much of his work was ephemeral, documentary photographs, preparatory documents, and videos served as material residues and ersatz artifacts. Ambasz brought to American audiences the stars of the Italian architecture and design scene. The objects, on the one hand, and the environments, on the other (all designed and manufactured in Italy), illustrated a similar straddling: a heterogeneous and often divergent body of work that nonetheless shared similar interests in the subjective experience of the viewer in both questioning and celebrating the discreet and unique object, in impermanence over permanence, in a critique of advanced industrialized societies, and most importantly, in domestic space as the genus locus of social and political resistance.Environments and Counter Environments. “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” MoMA, 1972, curated by Peter Lang, Luca Molinari, and Mark Wasiuta at the Graham Foundation, revisited the groundbreaking MoMA exhibition through a sequence of installations that revealed for the first time via archival material the “backstage” production that ultimately resulted in the public staging of full-scale prototypes in New York.3 These documents, which included preliminary studies, drawings, collages, models, and photographs, were organized by the participating architects according to each of the submissions: the “house environments” of Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass, and Joe Colombo; the arguably more provocative “mobile environments” of Alberto Rossellini, Marco Zanuso, and Mario Bellini—all of which were, in turn, categorized by Ambasz as examples of “Design as Postulation”; Gaetano Pesce’s “Project for an Underground City in the Age of Great Contaminations” as an example of “Design as Commentary”; and work by Ugo la Pietra, Archizoom, Superstudio, and Gruppo Strum categorized as “Counterdesign as Postulation.”4 All the material was, in turn, accompanied by explanatory texts that served two primary functions: to reintroduce the projects and their architects to a contemporary audience and to situate the work within a larger historical project.In addition, and in what was perhaps a calculated move, the Graham exhibition began not with documentation of one of the commissions but rather with a submission by 9999 titled “Vegetable Garden House”—the winning entry of a parallel “Competition for Young Designers” also instigated by Ambasz. Rather than proposing their own environment, the Florentine group presented material that documented the yearlong design and installation of a greenhouse as living space. Comprising what the architects referred to as an “eco-survival device,” the project’s main concern was to focus Ambasz’s curatorial intent on the ecological aspects of the word “environment.”As for the commissioned participants, Ambasz’s main criterion for choosing them was the extent to which they were dedicated to exploring, in his judgment, the role of domestic design within a broader framework of political and social engagement. The choice at the Graham to highlight the origins of the speculative environments (and to omit the mass-produced objects that formed the other major component of the 1972 exhibition) is a testament to the current and persistent interest in theorizing the sphere of domesticity. An exhibition about an exhibition, the Graham show was, at its core, referential, analytical, and as such, not a restaging in either content or layout. The interesting exception to this rule was the revival of the films from the original show. As at MoMA, they were used to accompany the design work—not meant as stand-alone pieces but as performative supplements enacting potential in situ scenarios for the environments.One could argue that a drawback to this meta-staging was that it presented a largely two-dimensional reexamination of the original show. While there were some models on view, the films remained the primary access to the spatial qualities of the built examples. And yet, the success of this exhibition lay precisely in the absence of the objects: the message then and in 2013 was that objects were less important in and of themselves and that the semantics of the term “environment” befit a broader design mandate. Environments require users, not spectators, and only then can architecture mobilize action.