Why the designer of the first Italian computer refused to work for the country's leading companies: Ettore Sottsass

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

He lived ninety years, and it seemed - thousands, because even in such a long life it is difficult to fit everything that he happened to accomplish. He went through the war and the POW camp to bring joy to the world. He designed the first Italian computer and shockingly Freudian vases, erected airports and made decorations … And at sixty-four, Ettore Sottsass left his career as a successful commercial designer to make his own revolution …

Ettore Sottsass was born in 1917, the son of an architect, and was educated in this field himself. During his studies at the university, he began to engage in research and design theory (and he continued to write and publish essays on design and art throughout his life). But before starting his own career, he ended up in the Italian army during the Second World War, fought in Montenegro and survived in a Yugoslav concentration camp. This experience seemed to have no impact on what Sottsass created. From under his hand came bright, cheerful things, full of play, irony and hidden eroticism. In 1959 he was invited to work for the Olivetti typewriter company. During these years in Italy, recovering from the war, "good design" reigned - rational and laconic forms, noble materials, strict logic and functionality. However, Sottsass, a born rebel, challenged "good taste" even in such a technological sphere - his models of typewriters were still simple and minimalistic, but their shape evoked emotion, and bright colors attracted the eye. I wanted to hold them in my hands, touch them, possess them. Many years later, he will be condemned for being too "exciting" typewriter design - forgetting that his authorship belongs to truly scandalous works, for example, a vase in the form of male genitals. A big fan of female beauty, Sottsas called one of his cars, the scarlet Valentine model, “a girl wearing a very short skirt” - she looked so bold and daring. During the years of his work with Olivetti, he received a prestigious award for the project of the first Italian-made computer, of course, very bright and optimistic.

Despite his bold claims, Sottsass was gaining recognition as a respectable consumer goods designer in the 60s until he found himself in India. The bright colors of a foreign country, its ancient culture turned Sottsass's idea of design. He realized that he no longer wants to follow the path of commercial design, that suffocates in a world full of rules, requirements, restrictions … Since then, he has never been a "full-time designer", although each of the companies with which he collaborated dreamed of getting him to the state.

First, he introduced the public to insane ceramic sculptures as home accessories. Then I started experimenting with materials, colors and prints. Fiberglass beds? Fine! Plastic, acrylic, laminate, silicone in the craziest and most unexpected combinations? Of course! Sottsass believed that a hedonistic, cheerful approach to design was the best fit for temperamental Italians, who "have been raided so many times that they decided not to build for centuries, but simply to enjoy life." The designer insisted that design deals with the spiritual side of life, and a thing has magical properties - and you need to design based on intuition, and not on technology. He was friends with beatniks and musicians, walked with Ernest Hemingway, played one novel after another (and in case of failure, sublimated into creativity - yes, that scandalous vase arose as a result of unhappy love). Sottsass glorified sensuality, his work took on exciting curves and strange physiology.

At the 1976 Venice Biennale, he met journalist and design researcher Barbara Radice. She was thirty-three, he was fifty-nine, and it was love - first for design, and then for each other. Barbara Radice owns the most detailed biography of Sottsass - after all, who, if not his wife, knew absolutely everything about him?

In 1981, Ettore Sottsass organized and led the Memphis group, which completely revolutionized the idea of Italians about design as such. He was sixty-four years old. The name of the group referred to the song of Bob Dylan, and it became clear - its representatives are ready to undermine the social foundations! “We have put the industry at the service of design,” they said, referring to their willingness to use the latest materials and technologies to create things that look more like works of avant-garde art than utilitarian objects. Sottsass overthrew the dictatorship of functionalism. Everyone could use his creations as they saw fit. They were funny, strange, uncomfortable, but invariably bright and expressive.

“You cannot furnish the interior with only Memphis things, this is the same as eating some cakes,” the designer wrote (besides, he compared these works with prohibited substances). However, another of his colleagues in the shop - though from the world of fashion - was ready to argue with this statement. Karl Lagerfeld furnished his luxurious home in Monaco with only Memphis furniture.

Sottsass turned to architecture only at a very mature age. He was already about eighty when he decided to return to the profession for which he had been preparing since childhood. As an architect, he still strove for convenience for consumers, but he said that the main thing in architecture is feelings. Therefore, Sottsass built mainly private houses, which perfectly expressed the inner world of the customers.

Sottsass did not part with the camera, once taking it in hand. He photographed … everything - inspired by the routine. For him, there were no differences between architecture, photography, painting and design - or rather, he considered the difference to be purely technological. All these are forms of expression of emotions, and a talented person (like himself) can work equally successfully in all areas.