Ettore Sottsass

Infobox Architect


image_size = (if image is smaller than 250px)
caption =
name = Ettore Sottsass
nationality = Italian
birth_date = Birth date|1917|9|14
birth_place = Innsbruck, Austria
death_date = Death date and age|2007|12|31|1917|9|14
death_place = Milan, Italy
practice_name =
significant_buildings= Mayer-Schwarz Gallery
Beverly Hills, California
significant_projects =
significant_design = Olivetti Valentine typewriter
[http://www.emeco.net/productline/nine-0.html Nine-0 Chair]
awards =

Ettore Sottsass (14 September 1917 – 31 December 2007) was an Innsbruck-born Italian architect and designer of the late 20th century. Sottsass was a flamboyant, influential, highly original and occasionally despised Italian designer and architect who was a leading member of the group which established postwar Italy's reputation for design. Sottsass made his name in the 1960s as an industrial designer for Olivetti (particularly the iconic red Valentine portable typewriter).Citation | last = | first = | author-link = | title =Ettore Sottsass: Designer who helped to make office equipment fashionable and challenged the standard notion of tasteful interiors
newspaper =The Times | pages =D8 | year =2008 | date =January 2, 2008 | url =http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3118052.ece] Citation | last =Stewart | first =Jocelyn Y. | author-link =Jocelyn Y. Stewart | title =Ettore Sottsass Jr., 90; Italian designer put passion, delight in utilitarian objects | newspaper =Los Angeles Times | pages =B9 | year =2008 | date =January 5, 2008 | url =http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-sottsass5jan05,1,1340930.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true]

Career

Sottsass was born September 14 1917, in Innsbruck, Austria, and grew up in Milan, where his father was an architect. In 1939 he graduated from Politecnico di Torino in Turin with a degree in architecture. He served in the Italian military and spent much of World War II in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. After returning from the war, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio in Milan in 1947, one of a new group of Italian designers which included Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino dedicated to postwar reconstruction.

Interested in south Asia, Sottsass traveled to India only to return to Italy a very sick man. Luckily, Sottsass had been befriended by Adriano Olivetti, son of Camillo Olivetti, a leading northern Italian industrial magnate. When Sottsass returned to his homeland, Olivetti was so concerned about the health of his friend that he gave Sottsass a blank check to seek a cure in the United States. While spending a year in and out of California hospitals, Sottsass managed to make friends with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as other leaders of the Beat Generation. Rejuvenated in health and spirit, Sottsass returned to Milan where he began working as a consultant designing the Olivetti's electronic equipment, typewriters and office furniture in 1959, despite his lack of technical knowledge. He designed a pop-influenced “totem”, and the ELEA 9003 calculator over his 40 years working with Olivetti. His redesign of the ELEA 9003, Olivetti's mainframe computer, won him Italy's highest design award in 1959. Sottsass added blocks of color to distinguish the various components of the computer from one another and lowered the height of the machine so workers could see one another over the top.

In 1969 he, along with Perry King, designed the bright red portable Olivetti Valentine typewriter with a lightweight plastic case. It became the ultimate fashion accessory for the “girl-about-town” of that era. Compared with the typical drab typewriters of the day, the 1969 Valentine was more pop art than industrial machine.

In 1981, Sottsass and an international group of young architects and designers, all in their 30s except for Sottsass who was 64, came together to form the Memphis Group. A night of drinking and listening to Bob Dylan’s ‘’Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’’ gave the group its name. Memphis was launched with a collection of 40 pieces of furniture, ceramics, lighting, glass and textiles which featured fluorescent colors, slick surfaces, intentionally lop-sided shapes and squiggley laminate patterns. Some critics of Memphis claimed that only affluent Dallas psychiatrists would ever buy such designs.

The groups colorful, ironic pieces departed considerably from his earlier, more strictly modernist work, and that was hailed as one of the most characteristic examples of Post-modernism in design and the arts. Sottsass described Memphis in a 1986 Chicago Tribune article: "Memphis is like a very strong drug. You cannot take too much. I don't think anyone should put only Memphis around: It's like eating only cake."

As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova, Knoll International, and Alessi. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of Apple's first computer mouse, in Woodside, California. He collaborated with well known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun.

Sottsass had a vast body of work; furniture, jewelry, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings which inspired generations of architects and designers. In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first major museum survey exhibition of his work in the United States. A retrospective exhibition, "Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress", was held at the Design Museum in London in 2007.

Bibliography

* Hans Höger, "Ettore Sottsass jr. - Designer, Artist, Architect", Wasmuth, Tübingen/Berlin 1993
* Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass, Electa, Milano, 1993
* F. Ferrari, Ettore Sottsass: tutta la ceramica, Allemandi, Torino, 1996
* M. Carboni (edited by), Ettore Sottsass e Associati, Rizzoli, Milano, 1999
* M. Carboni (edited by), Ettore Sottsass. Esercizi di Viaggio, Aragno, Torino, 2001
* M. Carboni e B. Radice (edited by), Ettore Sottsass. Scritti, Neri Pozza Editore, Milano 2002
* M. Carboni e B. Radice (edited by), Metafore, Skirà Editore, Milano 2002
* M. Carboni (edited by), Sottsass: fotografie, Electa, Napoli 2004
* M. Carboni (edited by), "Sottsass 700 disegni", Skirà Editore, Milano, 2005
* M. Carboni (edited by), "Sottsass '60/'70", Editions HYX, Orléans, 2006

References

External links

* [http://www.emeco.net/article/content/collaborations/designers/sottsass.html Emeco Nine-0 by Ettore Sottsass]
* [http://www.emeco.net/article/content/emecocinema/processfilms/sottsass.html The Life and Times of Ettore Sottsass]
* [http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/this_is_not_a_love_song/ Jennifer Kabat on Ettore Sottsass]
* [http://storiesofhouses.blogspot.com/#113238926863162261 Ernest Mourmans' House in Belgium by Ettore Sottsass]
* [http://www.designaddict.com/design_index/index.cfm/fuseaction/designer_show_one/DESIGNER_ID/197/ Ettore Sottsass in Design Addict's designers index]
* [http://www.studiopazo.com www.studiopazo.com ] Great Collection of Vases, furniture and lights by Ettore Sottsass
* [http://www.olivetti.it/ Olivetti official site]
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3118052.ece Obituary in "The Times", 2 January 2008]