“An object is something that tells a tale… You can almost read it, as if it were literature,” said the Italian designer Alessandro Mendini, who died last year. Mendini was one of the figures behind the explosion of disruptive, provocative design in postwar Italy, which was part of a larger effort to revive the country’s depressed economy. Prototypes, one-of-a-kind, and limited-edition works from the major Italian designers of the period, including Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, and Mendini, are collected in a new show exploring the radicalism at the heart of this movement. —J.V.

Traveling to: Yale University School of Architecture, New Haven (Fall 2021).