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Ettore Sottsass(1917-2007)
architect - designer
Born in the Austrian city of Innsbruck, his mother's native place, Ettore Sottsass in 1939 graduated in architecture as recommended by his father, the established Italian architect whose name also was Ettore Sottsass, from the Turin polytechnic.
He was then called by the Italian army and participated in the Second World War in a Yugoslavian concentration camp where he was held prisoner. This experience generated in him a strong antinationalistic feeling that he will reflect in some creations by giving them egalitarian motifs, either through the choice of materials which could be produced and sold at low costs, or by employing innovative forms.
Ettore Sottsass would love his parents and was highly respectful of his father's rationalist philosophy, however he was oriented towards an innovative approach to design according to which the functional aspect of an object is valuable only if it is enriched by the addition of elements that are sensual and capable of stimulating people's mind. In accordance with his philosophy, a product could in some cases disregard a strict concept of functionalism, like it appears in some of his iconographic creations, and in the Memphis collections.
When in 1945 he came back to Italy he worked for a year with his father, and in Milan opened his own office that became the landmark of a period during which he painted, wrote for the design and architecture magazine Domus, and was curator at the Milan Triennale.
In 1956 he explored New York and had a work experience with the established designer George Nelson that noticeably influenced his career by inspiring him to concentrate in the exercise of product industrial design instead of architecture. When back in Italy he engaged in a furniture design work for the factory Poltronova, and in 1958 was invited to work as a design consultant by the electronics manufacturing company Olivetti where he developed the concept of iconographic design to the full. An excellent example of it, if not the most relevant, is a type writer called Valentine to which, through effective representation both in advertising and, more in general, in mass-communication, were added some strong emotional values that were capable of defining a role with which a modern female could identify. The concept of the iconographic product that generated from there was subsequently applied to many high or low design fields, and to clothing by other designers and producers.
Using his understanding of psychology Ettore Sottsass had managed to create a tool that people could use to represent themselves among one another, and could be used effectively in the advocacy of new ideologies. Unlike some critics used to believe, he was not committed to the promotion of a specific ideology when designing the typewriter Valentine, but only to the creation of a representational tool that an individual could use. While the values of the most popular Eames' designs, like La Chaise, where identifying a social class, the values of the Valentine typewriter were identifying a personal role model that was not related to a class, but to a state of mind.
Ettore Sottsass' work tends not to be directly linked to specific brand phenomena of today's society, like, as an example, the one concerning the choice of some people to wear Nike trainers to endorse the inner disposition that the product represents. There are no known points of view of him about Nike or other popular brands with which he did not work; he seems to have just generously offered the masses a raw concept that an individual can use for personal purposes, that communicators can use to achieve a broader result, and that either of them can tailor to fit a sociological goal.
In 1981 he launched a design movement called Memphis that attracted the attention of the mass media and shaped the design surface of many fields of industrial production. On the foundations of the Memphis initiative was a combination of factors. On one side there was an awareness of the importance of studying more accurately some of the most significant ideas that were forming the basis for the development of the innovative designs that had been introduced in the market in the period around 1960. The material employed not only needed to be more affordable, but also safer. Hence fibreglass was not used very often for the Memphis collections. On another side there was the purpose of carrying on a research for a new type of functionalism to oppose to the strict rationalist concept that he had never adopted.
Ettore Sottsass had understood that the rationalist concept of functionality in fact was not rational and objective as its supporters would profess, because it was based on a set of assumptions about how people would need their furniture to be like. Rationalist lounge chairs seem to be the objective result of accurate observations of the human body's needs while in fact, being designed to allow only the supine position, they reflect prejudices about how people are expected to relax. He had identified the rationalist assumptions as part of the psychological structure that formed the basis for repression and nationalism, and with Memphis was trying to replace their absolutism with ideas of functionality that had not yet been explored.
The movement availed itself of the participation of many designers and architects who were interested in the experimentation with a new design method that was aimed at liberating the design profession from prejudices, and that would allow designers to be more self-expressionist and creative. Among them were Andrea Branzi, Michele De Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Aldo Cibic, Nathalie du Pasquier, and George Sowden. Their interaction produced creations from an idea of functionalism that had started from zero, and that could be easily mistaken for a celebration of dysfunctional design by those who did not understand it.
The mass media promoted Memphis, but depicted it in a distorted way to make it appear to the public like a successful, yet chaotic way of having fun while vandalising the concept of classic industrial design. Mass media audiences were led to believe that the movement was aimed at experimenting with bright colours and unusual shapes for the sake of it rather than for attempting to contribute towards the creation of a freer and more independent society.
In 1985 Ettore Sottsass put an end to the paradoxical mass media representations by quitting the movement, and concentrated more deeply on the work of his design practice Sottsass Associati with the collaboration of Aldo Cibic and Andrea Branzi. His company embarked on a wide range of projects among which were those for the manufacturing companies Philips, Siemens, and Apple Computers. Meanwhile Memphis become an established design theory that designers today can refer to when developing new concepts.
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related
subjects:
links:
www.poltronova.com
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