A career designing buildings, furniture, electronics, ceramics, lighting, jewellery and textiles, Ettore Sottsass was a man of the world who wrote poetry and collected friends including Allen Ginsberg, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. His colourful, evocative work pushed and pulled the design industry's toy, industrialisation, to create pieces that expressed an attitude that still connects today.
A decade after his death, the colourful, evocative work of designer Ettore Sottsass is going through somewhat of a renaissance. Earlier this year in Venice, a show dedicated to the Italian designer’s glass and crystal was curated by Luca Massimo Barbero who gathered 220 designs from 1947 to 2007, many of the pieces never made public before. While just a few piazzas away at Piazza San Marco, a show of early Sottsass ceramics opened at the Carlo Scarpa-designed Negozio Olivetti. Once the headquarters for its typewriters and calculators, it is also the place where Ettore Sottsass first made his name in the 1950s. Ettore lives on.
Sottsass trained as an architect and spent his career designing: buildings, furniture, electronic products, ceramics, lighting, jewellery and textiles. His interest in the arts extended to poetry and writing, and he embraced the work of Allen Ginsberg who he toured through Italy during the late 1950s. Sottsass waa a man who liked to surround himself with an eclectic mix of creatives, and as well as Ginsberg, he was friends with Helmut Newton, Max Ernst, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pablo Picasso. He was prolific and would often work through the night pushing and prodding the industry's new toy, industrialisation. For him, design was more than function. He saw the need for personality in objects. Designs that expressed an attitude and feeling and connected with the world through form and a vibrant overlay of colour, texture and pattern. His designs were often adorned with polka-dotts and leopard prints. He believed that design should question the status quo. If you are designing a chair, why not also propose a new way to sit.
The Colonna series by Ettore Sottsass for Kartell. Photo c/o Kartell.
The colourful collection of Ettore Sottsass fabrics and stools for Kartell. Photo c/o Kartell.
The designer’s maverick approach built a following that continues today. In 2015 Italian design brand Kartell led a revival of the Memphis design movement. Collaborating with Memphis Group members Nathalie du Pasquier and George Sowden the Italian manufacturer would create a collection of Memphis fabrics to cover some of their favourite chairs – Philippe Starck's Mademoiselle chair, Patricia Urquiola's Foliage and the Trix lounge by Piero Lissoni.
This year, to mark 100 years since Ettore Sottsass was born, two new exhibitions opened, ‘Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical’ at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and ‘Poet and Rebel: Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Legacy’ at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. At the Vitra Design Museum, curator Heng Zhi explored the world of Sottsass through Vitra's own collection, taking a look at the designer whose impact on objects, and on us, is ongoing. This extract from the exhibition essay commissioned by the Vitra Design Museum traces the legacy of the Austro-Italian designer and his influence on so many brands and products.
The Etrusco Mirror by Ettore Sottsass for Glas Italia, here and following. Photos c/o Glas Italia.
‘We read the world sensuously, We also catalogue it and intellectualise it, but the source of everything remains the senses. To a Functionalist, the surface of this table is a geometrical square; to me, it’s a piece of plastic, warm or cold.’
Ettore Sottsass
Detail of the Gli Specchi di Dioniso #6 mirror by Ettore Sottsass for Glas Italia. Photo c/o Glas Italia.
Detail of the Gli Specchi di Dioniso #1 mirror by Ettore Sottsass for Glas Italia. Photo c/o Glas Italia.
‘Poet and Rebel: Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Legacy' exhibit
Ettore Sottsass's iconic alentine Portable Typewriter designed in 1968. Photo c/o Vitra Design Museum.
The Faituttotu series of pots and stools by Ettore Sottsass for Serralunga. Photo c/o Serralunga.
The bold and graphic Bitossi vases by Ettore Sottsass. Photo c/o Bitossi.
The Sybilla mirror by Ettore Sottsass for Glas Italia. Photo c/o Glas Italia.
'Sottsass’s most famous works are his furniture designs for the Memphis group, which created a sensation and ushered in the postmodern aesthetic of the 1980s. The shrill colours, patterns and forms of Memphis objects were inspired by motifs from everyday life, Pop culture and the non-European civilisations encountered by Sottsass during his extensive travels from the 1960s...'
Heng Zhi, Curator, ‘Poet and Rebel: Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Legacy’, Vitra Design Museum
‘One of the most influential and unconventional figures in twentieth-century design, Ettore Sottsass gained renown with his designs for the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti, for his poetic, minimalist sculptural objects, and as the leading figure of the Memphis design collective in the 1980s. Over the course of his long career, Sottsass moved between disciplines, leaving behind a fascinating oeuvre that is represented by many objects in the collection of the Vitra Design Museum. Sottsass’s most famous works are his furniture designs for the Memphis group, which created a sensation and ushered in the postmodern aesthetic of the 1980s. The shrill colours, patterns and forms of Memphis objects were inspired by motifs from everyday life, Pop culture and the non-European civilisations encountered by Sottsass during his extensive travels from the 1960s...
'Yet, early signs of the pioneering Memphis aesthetic were already visible in Sottsass’s work from prior decades, beginning in the late 1950s. As Art Director at the furniture manufacturer Poltronova (1958–1974), Sottsass developed a signature style in furniture design by combining vivid colours and distinctive structures. During many decades of work for the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti, he created legendary objects like the Valentine typewriter which became a symbol of Pop design. Sottsass continued his closely observed career path in the 1970s by taking on various roles – as a participant in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’(1972), as a central figure of the design initiative Global Tools (1973-1975), or as a member of the design collective Alchimia (1976-1980). In all of these activities, Sottsass persistently challenged the established tastes of the middle class by confronting it with his poetic, unorthodox objects…This is what ultimately makes Sottsass stand out in the history of twentieth-century design: as a rebel and a poet, whose legacy continues to enrich our everyday lives.’
More Space Summer Reading Series – ‘Ettore Sottsass: architect, poet and master of Memphis' was selected from the More Space archive for the 2022 Summer Reading Series. The story first appeared in More Space on 28 June, 2017.
The designs of Ettore Sottsass live on with manufacturers including Kartell, Serralunga, Bitossi and Glas Italia, all exclusively available across South East Asia from Space – Australia – and Space – Singapore and Malaysia.
