At Milan’s Salone del Mobile in 1971, Florentine architect Lapo Binazzi assembled polyurethane pieces into a Doric temple, queued up his sound track, and pressed play. “Our dream was to ruin the temple to the ground, to the sound of an earthquake,” remembers Binazzi, now 74 and still based in Florence. The practical application of the remaining chunks of columns and pediment? Chairs and tables for college students.

Such playful destruction was a fitting metaphor for the time, as the world convulsed with student protests, worker revolts, and creative outbursts like Pop Art and rock ’n’ roll. In the mid-1960s, young architecture students across Italy began channeling their revolutionary ideas into provocative furniture, interiors, artworks, and installations that challenged the prevailing less-is-more modernism and rampant consumerism of postwar Italy.