Next in line is a 1970 Braun transistor radio. Braun was at the forefront of the German modern industrial design with its minimalist and functional style. The reason why it caught my attention at the museum is that we had one of these pieces at my old house in Thessaloniki. My mother would often cook and listen to the damn thing. When my mother cooks there is always a TV or a radio on, except for when we have guests. Invariably, then, all the conversations around lunch time have to be conducted in a louder than usual voice which of course is very convenient for her because she is a high-school teacher and used to speaking loud. Anyways, I think we might have dumped the transistor somewhere when we moved to a new house, or perhaps it's at my grandmother's place.
As the two arch-rivals plunged into the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, they abandoned the amiability of the early Khrushchev years. Art and design became fascinated with nuclear catastrophe, spies and high-tech military gadgets. Kubrick's black comedy Dr. Strangelove captured the absurdity of the era and the production designer of the movie, Kenneth Adam designed the War Room as a concrete bomb shelter featuring a circular table where diplomacy is played like poker.
It was around that time that the space race captured the imagination of artists, architects and designers. This is - I think - by far the best room in the exhibition perhaps because it demonstrates how much of modern design smacks of the utopian (or dystopian) vision of those years. Below, a house entrance (from Alison and Smithson's House of the Future) and a chair (by Eero Aarnio) inspired by life on a spaceship.
The images of satellites and the possibility of space colonies in remote hostile planets launched the building of strange structures on earth. Some of them like the Jested Tower in Czechoslovakia were built on very unwelcoming terrain. Others, like the BT Tower were raised in the middle of London. Typical of the period, the BT Tower was actually a state secret and did not appear on offical maps until the mid-1990s, when its existence was confirmed by a government MP.
Icould not imagine how the space craze could be translated into everyday clothing, until I saw the Pierre Cardin "Cosmos" design. If you have found yourselves in posh circles of downtown London or university campuses recently, you cannot but agree that the English still love this stuff.
And then, of course, the late sixties came in all their glory and there was talk of revolution and a new society, freed from Communist or Capitalist hierarchies and fueled by new forms of social protest. In a sense, modernity itself, the object of the race (and the exhibition) until then, was disputed. My take on the period is that a lot of the protesting students were spoilt bourgeois brats, as demonstrated so vividly in this clip from Godard's La Chinoise:
One of the posters I couldn't find online to post it was the in-your-face rejection of liberal democracy by the protesting youth (it read "to vote is to die a little"). It was designed by the Atelier Populaire in May 1968. I have replaced it with another famous poster of similar tone from Atelier Populaire. Below and on the right, a part of one of my favorite exhibits, Boris Mikhailov's "Red Series" of photography, which depicted the meaninglessness of the Soviet symbols in all their kitsch glory. 
Below, Mikhail Kalatozov's "Soy Cuba" conveys, through the camera-work, the energy that shook the movement of the period. It contrasts the decadence of pre-revolutionary Cuba and the moral fervor of the upcoming revolution:
Last, but not least, the unofficial logo of the exhibition, the stuff of best-selling t-shirts and, perhaps, a comment on who won the Cold War:
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