The Language of Things
By Deyan Sudjic
Allen Lane £20, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

When the Milan Triennale, then the world’s biggest and most prestigious design event, opened in May 1968, intellectuals, architects, artists and students – including the Triennale’s own director – staged a sit-in. They built an installation of a barricaded streetscape with torn up cobbles, an overturned van and stacks of white goods – the very appliances the exhibition had, until then, promoted.