Published by Merrell London, 2006, hardcover, illustrated, 158 pages, index, 25 cms x 29 cms, no dust jacket otherwise condition: as new.
Ettore Architect and Designer - the first significant study of the work of Sottsass for over a decade - emphasizes the continuing diversity and innovation of his professional life while illuminating his personal design philosophy, his belief in the intimate relationship between design and the individual, and his fundamental humanity and joie de vivre. Drawing in particular on the work of the two decades since Sottsass left the Memphis collective, this book reassesses his relationship to Modernism and Postmodernism, analyzes the increasing importance to Sottsass of his own architectural practice, and considers both his acceptance and his rejection of the traditional use of materials. In a series of interviews specially undertaken for this book, Sottsass reflects on the cross-currents of ideas and influences that have guided his long career.
Ettore Sottass, the most important personality in Italian design in the second half of the 20th century, spent the 1950s working with his father, Ettore Sr., who was one of the most important Italian rationalist architects of the 1930s. In this monograph on Sottsass Jr., James Steele first describes that period, and then the various influences that made young Ettore a cosmopolitan, whole-earth hippie of the 1960s (the Beat poets in America, Eastern philosophies in India).
Although his major contribution was as an industrial designer, and he became very famous in that field, by his seventies he had also become a considerable architect, and his buildings are comprehensively covered here. The many colour photographs cannot hope to be comprehensive, but they do give an accurate overview of his architecture and industrial design, whilst the essays bring out the seriousness of his purpose, which was to design objects that address the collective unconscious: he saw wineglasses as sacrificial drinking cups, and flower vases as domestic totems. The book includes an interview, where he discourses on architecture, colour, ornament, innovation, power and money, designing for the poor, and - most interestingly - how creativity comes from the periphery of society, and is then appropriated by the mainstream. The interview conveys the picture of a loquacious character who was unconventional, satirically using different design languages and kitsch references, and questioning doctrines of good taste and form.
Although many may know Sottsass because of his association with the design group Memphis, he only started Memphis in 1981, having already designed innumerable important objects over the previous 20 years. Memphis repackaged, for international consumption, much of what had previously been developing in radical Italian design; it quickly deteriorated into just a brand, and four years later Sottsass left. Reassuringly, this book does not obsess about Memphis, and treats it as just one now long-superseded phase of a much larger story.
In his architecture, Sottsass was no less meticulous about detail, as we see in the beautiful pool of his Jasmine House, Singapore (1996-2000), which is lined with turquoise ceramic mosaic. His Yuko House in Tokyo (1991-93) is intentionally rudimental, yet refined in its arrangement of plinth and colonnade, with its upper storeys completely clad in ceramic tiles and having only a single window, painstakingly detailed. But his insistence on strong colours - so effective in the design pieces - only looks chaotic when he used them in buildings. Like his friend Aldo Rossi, his architecture is only built shapes: they lack constructional, structural, or spatial intensity and his search for profundity, which he achieved in his vases and typewriters, did not carry over into the houses. Nevertheless as a thinker and doer, many years after his death Sottsass remains a guiding and inspiring light, or as the industrialist Alberto Alessi described him a real mentor, one of my maestros, the guru of radical design, something of a philosopher, bursting with charisma, with something interesting to say about everything.
