Ettore Sottsass If Something Saves Us It Will Be Beauty
A true design anthropologism, which places man and his needs at the center of the creative process, informs the practice of Ettore Sottsass. On the occasion of the “Ettore Sottsass and the Social Factory” survey show at the ICA in Miami, we retrace the footsteps of the great Italian designer, architect and artist (1917-2007): from formative trips to America, India and Nepal, to collaborations for
Olivetti and Poltronova, and the “radical” experience of the Global Tools laboratories and of the Memphis group. It is a trajectory in which ethics and aesthetics, moral commitment and formal necessity are inextricably intertwined.
“If something saves us, it will be beauty.” Thus theorized Ettore Sottsass in his 2001 writings. For Sottsass, aesthetics was a sort of ethical and moral commitment—the political tool for creating a present that would be built around man and his needs. It matters little, then, that they were conceived as objects of design, destined to improve our daily life with their dual aesthetic and functional value; or as architectures, created to understand and interpret society.
A painter, photographer, designer and sculptor, Sottsass loved being called “Architect”. And yet, architecture never dominated other disciplines in his work, which were all explored equally in a vision that never created distinctions between them, except with regard to technique. All of them, in spite of their incredible heterogeneity, were distinguished by a coherent formal code. A staunch defender of interdisciplinarity, Sottsass affirmed that his job was to design the artificial, whether places or objects, and to tell his own story of the relationship between society and the individual. Ettore Sottsass Jr. (the son of Ettore Sottsass Sr., who also an architect) was born in Innsbruck in 1917. He graduated with a degree in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Turin in 1939, painting abstract though still figurative paintings, in the footsteps of the painter Luigi Spazzapan. Few associate him, however, with the Movement for Concrete Art, of which he was a participant. The MAC was the first of many collective design experiments with which Sottsass tried to give a culturally committed response to the development of modern industrialized society. After this movement, Global Tools, Alchimia, Memphis, and collective publishing experiments like Pianeta Fresco and Terrazzo followed.
With the love of, and curiosity for, man at the base of his design anthropology, Sottsass was inspired to make numerous formative trips. As well as those to America, where he came into contact with Pop culture and the Beat Generation, were repeated stays in Asia, alternating between India, Nepal and Burma. Such trips, for him, represented a cataloging tool. With the meticulousness of the anthropologist, he systematically photographed houses, objects and tools, which he then archived as indispensable instruments for investigating human beings. What attracted him most of all was rural architecture--the places where a simple life was led.
In 1956, his meeting with designer George Nelson led Sottsass to discover for the first time a completely different world, in which the excessive use of colors was very far from the greyness of post-war Milan. It was a chromatic revelation, that transformed both his aesthetic approach and graphic vocabulary. During his stay in the United States, he drew inspiration from American popular culture, including neon signs, the striped graphics of Greyhound buses, and service station architecture. The influence of artists such as Frank Stella or Sol LeWitt was also significant, inspiring him to create the series of layered furniture “Superbox” for Poltronova in 1966.
Equally fundamental was the first of his numerous trips to India in 1960, together with Fernanda Pivano, his wife at the time. It was a journey in which Sottsass was deeply fascinated by colors and shapes, but also by the ease with which the past coexisted with the present, and the ancient with the modern. India represented a different dimension, far from the obsession with the new and perfect that seemed to grip Western culture.
Sottsass’s anthropocentric vision was the basis of his thirtyyear collaboration with the Olivetti company. When he took on the computer project “Elea 9003” for example (1959), whose
dimensions resembled an environment more than an object, the designer considered not only rational requirements, as the Bauhaus had theorized, but especially those of the psyche and soul of the men who would have worked in those rooms and interacted with those objects. This combination of body and mind was the code of cultural militancy with which Ettore tackled all the projects of his long career.
“Without Sottsass, our life would be colorless,” wrote Austrian architect Hans Hollein, who shared the bold experience of the Memphis group with the Italian designer. And indeed, color marked Sottsass’s entire work. We need only think of the revolutionary use of color in Olivetti Synthesis, the line of office furniture from the company of the same name: there, he introduced color into the interiors of work environments, using it not as a tool not for hierarchical definition, but for functionality and emotionality. The furniture designed for the visionary company Ivrea was so modular and simple but characterized by the use of color. In addition to the emblematic chair Dactylo Z9R (1968) in yellow ABS, we may think above all of the Valentine, created in 1969, the first portable typewriter, which was entirely red. It was truly his color, and an advertising campaign, illustrated by Milton Glaser, made it an icon for the whole generation: the progeniture of Allen Ginsberg’s poems and the music of Bob Dylan. Light but sturdy thanks to the boxcase in which it was contained, and easily transportable thanks to its handle, the Valentine was the perfect example of how Sottsass sought to humanize technology, making it a tool for man and not the other way around. A forerunner of today’s revolution, initiated by Apple with the first iPods, the Valentine was the symbol of a generation that fought for free love and for its political ideals. Used as a vocabulary for telling stories, colors are equally decisive in Sotsass’s architectural work, where they are used to identify volumes and their functions. We may think for instance of the very bright Casa Wolf at Ridgway in Colorado (1987-89), the Black House in Zurich, made for the gallery owner Bischofberger (1991-96), the pink volume of Casa Yuko in Tokyo (1992-93), created with the American architect Johanna Grawunder, or the color combinations of Casa Nanon, made for the gallery owner Ernest Mourmans in Belgium (1995-98). All of these buildings bear witness to a bold use of primary colors, used to define spaces and give them a spiritual, sensory and poetic dimension. Besides color, the theme of surfaces is a leitmotiv that accompanies Sottsass’s entire production. It is a theme that translates into the search for chromatic and material combinations, often resulting in an inexhaustible production of ceramics and subsequent experimentation with glass, lava and Japanese lacquer—not to mention the graphic patterns designed for Abet Laminati.
The long and fruitful collaboration with Aldo Londi, artistic director of Bitossi Ceramiche, with whom Sottsass experimented with forms, colors and materials in the greatest freedom and stylistic fusion, led Sottsass to produce works that were defined as sculptures of common use.
The vase is a recurring element in Sottsass’s production, not so much for its function—flowers, for him, were superfluous—as for its role as a metaphor for the world: cosmopolitan thoughts were synthesized in a vase-object or taken to extremes in totemic sculptures whose subversive and revolutionary charge was always accompanied by a political and ideological use of words. The exhibition “Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants and Gas Pumps” of 1967 at the Galleria Sperone in Milan was emblematic in this sense: totemic sculptures, between American pop culture and the divine Indian element, were accompanied by a manifesto against power and arrogance, in favor of love and happiness.
From radical design to Memphis there was little distance, and the goal was the same, namely the quest for a collective utopia. It was in Florence that Sottsass happened upon radical design, through the experiences of Archizoom and Superstudio. They were experiences assimilated into some projects for Poltronova (of which he was Artistic Director from 1958 to 1973), for which he created the famous series of “gray furniture” in fiberglass in 1970—domestic syntheses of the new way of living in an antibourgeois style. His encounters with the protagonists of radical criticism in Florence inspired the founding of a new collective that, through the establishment of design laboratories, propagated the use of natural materials and processes. Thus, from 1973 to 1978, between Milan, Naples and Florence, Global Tools was born, whose founders were among several exponents of radical architecture--Andrea Branzi and members of Arte Povera such as Germano Celant and Luciano Fabro. Global Tools laboratories’ experimental programs were aimed at establishing an alternative relationship with Italian industry, through the rejection of intellectualization and consumerist logic.
The Global Tools adventure was followed by that of the Alchimia group, later abandoned in order to found Memphis in 1981, and culminating later in the founding of the magazine Terrazzo, in collaboration with Barbara Radice, Christoph Radl, Santi Caleca and Anna Wagner—a magazine that published thirteen issues between 1988 and 1996, and in which refined research was interwoven with contemporary influences.
“Memphis is a state of mind, that of the end of the twentieth century”, wrote George Nelson after seeing the first New York show, “Memphis at Midnight”, in a Chelsea loft in 1982. Founded at Sottsass’s house to the sounds of Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the group brought together, from 1981 to 1987, under the guidance of Barbara Radice—Sotsass’s great love and his second wife—various international designers looking for a real break. Martine Bedin, Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Nathalie du Pasquier, George Sowden, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini and, subsequently, Shiro Kuramata, Hans Hollein, Andrea Branzi and Arata Isozaki, unmistakably marked the history of design over a six-year period, which from that moment on would forever be divided into pre- and post-Memphis.
The color, the playfulness of the forms, the aesthetic value ascribed to the object rather than to its function, and the use of humble materials such as plastic laminate, dealt a great shock to the dominant bourgeois style. Since the first show at the Milan gallery Arc’74 until today, the Memphis projects remain relevant today as objects of homage and of commercial and cultural rediscovery. Their relevance is not merely decorative, but socio-linguistic—grounded in that famous anthropological project that so substantially marks all of Ettore Sottsass’s work.