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With his work for Olivetti in the 1950s and 1960s, Ettore Sottsass
helped define industrial design. For the past 10 years or so,
however, he's turned his interest and talents to one of his first
loves: architecture. At 80, at last he feels prepared to build.
by Penelope Rowlands
Celebration seems to be what's called for when we consider the
work of Ettore Sottsass Jr., a visionary who happens to be the
world's most famous designer, an endless reinterpreter of objects,
furniture, and houses. Sottsass is also a photographer, writer,
sculptor, ceramicist, glass artist, and painter--a Renaissance
man who sees things that the rest of us do not. "It's like da
Vinci's around and you get to hang out with him," says one awestruck
friend, David Kelley, principal of the Silicon Valley design firm,
IDEO. But, at 80, Sottsass himself has come to the very Vedic
conclusion that he knows nothing at all. "I never think I can
touch the sky," he says, paraphrasing Sappho.
This was made clear to him during an encounter with a pet. "Once,
there was a cat looking at me while I was putting on a warm jacket
in winter," Sottsass tells me at his office at Sottsass Associati
in Milan. "The cat was looking at me, and I realized he will never
know why I'm putting this on because his brain is not organized
enough for this kind of thing. I'm in the same position with the
sky."
To talk with Sottsass is to realize how rarely you've considered
the point of view of a cat. He once said that "one of the great
shocks of my life" was seeing photographs of the planet Earth
from a distance after the moon landing in 1969. Earlier, in the
mid-1950s, he first sat down to design computers for Olivetti,
in the long professional association that would make him--and Italian
design itself--famous around the world, he visualized something
"mysterious, cold, in the image of an impenetrable god" before
getting to work. Now Sottsass, who trained as an architect, has
returned to designing houses. Predictably enough, the structures
he's building with his associates, including one in the Hawaiian
Islands that owner Adrian Olabuenaga describes as "a table with
four legs and the house is under the table," aren't predictable
at all.
Neither is Sottsass Associati's vision for the Malpensa 2000 Airport
in Milan, in which the usual conceits of airport interior design--the
glass, the chrome, the implied hurried life--were bypassed, in
favor of wood, stone, and terrazzo tile, materials more often
associated with warmth and permanence. Nor the pillared, pastel
Zhaoqing golf club and resort (done with associates Johanna Grawunder
and Federica Barbiero), currently rising out of the lush landscape
of southeastern China. Nor such smaller projects as the many-roomed
birdhouse, complete with artificial lake, that he and Grawunder
designed for a Belgian art gallery. Nor, most assuredly, Sottsass's
latest top secret project for Alessi.
Outside, in Milan's fashion-conscious Brera district, it's as
frenzied as New York, but in Sottsass's office all is relatively
quiet--a metaphor, perhaps, for what it's like to have arrived
at a venerable age. "I have many dead people around me," he says,
veering, as he frequently seems to do, toward the metaphysical.
"If you love certain friends with whom you've lived or even just
eaten pasta, you start living in a state of nostalgia all the
time. I've had many lovers, girls I've loved very much. The memories
are always there." And yet, he's certainly rooted in the here
and now.
As we talk, Sottsass takes phone calls, and asks passing assistants
questions. "We're working too much," he complains, looking decades
younger than he should, wearing his hair in his signature long,
white braid tied with a blue ribbon, and black Reeboks on his
feet. He's as opinionated as ever. On the day after the murder
of his fellow Milanese Gianni Versace, Sottsass is grim about
the fact itself, but irreverent about Versace's profession, which
he describes as "putting sugar on the asses of those funny ladies."
And he dismisses his friend Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
in a few caustic sentences: "I'm not happy with it. I'm scared
of that thing. It's all metal; it's sharp."
His own work is anything but. His designs have humor and fluidity.
His use of color has been revolutionary, ranging from the bright
red Valentine typewriter he did for Olivetti in 1969 to the acidic
candy hues of the furniture produced by Memphis, the loosely formed
international group of 30 designers, which Sottsass headed from
the time it was founded, in 1981, until it disbanded in 1988.
"We tried to redesign the Italian landscape," he once wrote. He
and his colleagues at such "anti-design" hothouses as Archizoom,
Superstudio, and UFO, and, later, at the Studio Alchimia (which
Sottsass helped found in 1976), and then Memphis, took on so many
aspects of that landscape, from jewelry to tea kettles, glassware
to ceramics, that they really did succeed. The things Sottsass
makes have a vivid, almost anthropomorphic power. "He transformed
objects into things that have character," says Paola Antonelli,
associate curator of design at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
"To me, that's the revolution that will be a column in
design history."
With walls lined in quilted silver Mylar curtains, his office
seems designed to deflect chaos. "I wanted rooms like tents, so
managers sitting there don't have a fixed idea of life," Sottsass
says. A mountain of architectural models--in marble, wood, even
Legos--on a filing cabinet depict current projects in Belgium,
China, Hawaii. The wall is bare except for two black-and-white
photographs--one, of his architect father, the late Ettore Sottsass
Sr., in soft profile; the other, a tiny picture of a female nude--and
they nicely sum up two lifelong preoccupations: the first, his
heritage as an architect; the second, his extravagant love of
women, all women. After one marriage, to Fernanda Pivato--the noted
translator of the American Beat writers--and a longtime cohabitation
with Barbara Radice, with whom he published Terrazzo, the now-defunct
international design magazine, Sottsass lives alone (but hardly
in solitude, one guesses) in an apartment in Milan.
He grew up in the city of Trente in northern Italy, the only child
of an Italian mother and an Austrian father, who, as family legend
has it, placed a pencil in his son's hand just after his birth.
This tactic succeeded, apparently: Sottsass Jr. drew obsessively
throughout his childhood, and, to this day, uses sketching as
a way to think through his hands. "I never stop drawing," he confesses.
During our talk, he illustrates a point by leaning over and making
a quick sketch in my notebook, one of several he'll do in our
time together. Later, things turn surreal when, with me trying
frantically to take notes, and him struggling to convey an idea
with a sketch, we find ourselves each tugging at the same page.
"I always wanted to be an architect," Sottsass tells me. "I learned
from my father to be a handicraft architect and not an industrial
architect. The way of building was very much related to the hands,
and very little with the head. In those times, architecture was
not a cultural, intellectual problem, it was a very pragmatic
profession. That's the environment in which I grew up. I was in
some ways learning this tradition, but I was naturally learning
to enlarge the tradition, the awareness of the meaning of architecture."
Although he graduated from Turin Politecnico with a degree in
architecture in 1939, designing buildings was only one of his
preoccupations; he also read a lot of philosophy at college and
studied painting afterwards. At the outbreak of World War II,
he joined the Italian army; during the war, his life was repeatedly
saved by flukish occurrences. "Every time I had to face danger,
something happened," he says. Once, an ear infection prevented
him from shipping out to Greece. Another time, after reporting
late for duty, he discovered his battalion had left without him.
"It went to Russia, and almost no one came back," he says, almost
blandly. Like so many who survived, he suffered untold horrors,
at one point even spending months as a prisoner of the Germans
in Sarajevo. "I was very weak, very damaged mentally after four
years of stupidity," he adds. "Worst of all, I was very, very
poor. To survive I started doing everything I could. I wanted
to build."
He received his first commission after winning a competition to
build workers' houses under the Marshall Plan. "It wasn't architecture,
it was building. It was the production of rooms"--an expression
that more or less describes the kinds of projects he scrounged
over the next few years. He finally quit architecture "for practical
reasons"; he was unrelievedly poor, and besides, fate had intervened
in the form of Adriano Olivetti, the head of what was then the
IBM of Italy, who approached him on the strength of some of his
ceramics and sculpture that had been published in Domus, the architecture,
art, and design monthly. Sottsass freelanced as an industrial
designer for years before joining Olivetti as chief design consultant
in 1957. Once installed in the company's new electronics department,
he had no idea how to proceed. "I didn't know anything about electronics,
and since there was no iconography in the field, I had no examples
to follow." Thus began his meditation on inscrutable deities.
At the time, he recalls, "no one knew what electronics would be.
Electronic mechanisms were put in big cabinets and secluded in
universities. Adriano understood that he had to start thinking
electronically and not mechanically." Then things began to change.
"In my life, I witnessed a very great revolution," he says. "It
was a very expensive revolution. It was a very interesting exercise,
to understand what really was in the back of the technology and
how much a designer could take part." When Sottsass came along,
electronics was a serious business, but he stirred it up, bringing
fun, humor, sexiness to the brand-new computer age. The machines
were cold and scary then--no one knew what they might do. Sottsass
demystified them. For example, his Elea 9003, designed for Olivetti
in 1958, looks downright cuddly--"user friendly" long before such
a concept existed. You want to sit down and get to know it.
For Sottsass, though, the excitement of computer design didn't
last. He left Olivetti in the late 1960s. "I became bored," he
says, adding that he'll never return to this kind of design. "Today,
electronics has reached the point where my brain is not prepared
to follow." Besides, he's appalled by today's corporate climate.
"One of the worst things is the growing of the marketing culture
as a sort of science," he says. "I am untalented when it comes
to public relations, particularly at institutional levels. I like
to have friends, rich friends, poor friends, not necessarily useful
friends."
Sottsass has confessed to approaching objects like buildings,
even using the Golden Section--one of Classical architecture's
rules of proportion--in their design. "All my creations look like
small architecture," he has said. Look at the patterned, laminated
madness that was the Memphis line of furniture. What kind of architecture
this is, exactly, it's hard to say; the point is its extreme good
cheer, not its provenance. The much-discussed Carlton, an exuberant,
flamboyantly inefficient, multicolored display shelf, is a case
in point. To what do we owe its inspiration? The Aztecs? Keith
Haring? Computer games?
You could debate forever if this is architecture, miniature or
not. The pithier question just might be: "Is it sane?" Doubtful,
extremely doubtful, but it's certainly intriguing. So are lots
of other Memphis things, for that matter, from the 1981 Metro,
a metal and marble extravagance of dubious functionality, to the
1982 Alaska, a cubistic silver vase that could have leapt out
of a painting by Georges Braque.
But even the joyous experiment of Memphis proved dull to Sottsass
after a time, and, characteristically, he moved on. "It lasted
four, five years, then it was consumed," he says. You could make
the case that the line was so extreme, design-wise, that its rapid
obsolescence was inevitable. "It was such a unique and radical
statement," as Paolo Polledri, a former architecture and design
curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, puts it. "I
think it had value just for the time," adding that, ultimately,
the line was also undermined by its patchy quality.
In 1980, Sottsass and three colleagues founded Sottsass Associati,
which has now evolved into a design collective of 30 members,
practicing architecture and interior and product design. They
took on all sorts of projects--shops for Fiorucci and Esprit, a
Beverly Hills art gallery with a display window that resembles
the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb; a fantasy-shot bar in
Japan done in playhouse colors. During this period, Sottsass also
designed stainless-steel trays and other products for Alessi,
art exhibits for museums and galleries, furniture for Knoll and
Poltronova, big, cubistic jewelry for Cleto Munari, among many
other things. However, the joy he once found in this kind of work
was fading. "Slowly, I began getting a very bitter philosophy
about industrial design," he says. "My friends who are industrial
designers are scared. They're scared of the client. It's like
being in front of a wall with a firing squad. The only thing an
industrial designer can do today is light a cigarette before being
shot."
Meanwhile, Sottsass's focus was turning elsewhere. "I think that,
slowly, I'm becoming ready to do architecture," he warned the
world in a charmingly illustrated, handwritten four-page autobiography,
later included in the catalogue for his retrospective at the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1994. "I think that to be an architect,
you have to become very soft, very calm, with a very great sensitivity
to life."
That softer brand of architecture has since been practiced by
Sottsass Associati in projects around the world. "I always sought
to enlarge the awareness of the meaning of architecture," he says.
"Architecture to me is a many-direction way of living. It has
no limits. Architecture is everything." He admires the architecture
of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and, working today, Michael
Graves, with whom he nonetheless profoundly disagrees. "I am the
contrary of Graves' idea. I think a house is a house. It's not
a sculpture. For Graves, a house is an explosion of ideas. I appreciate
it. I think it's beautiful what he's doing."
Sottsass came back to architecture for his usual serendipitous
reasons: "We were again lucky, because a very rich friend asked
us to build a house." The friend in question was photography dealer
Daniel Wolf. The house, designed in the late 1980s with Johanna
Grawunder on Wolf's property near Ridgeway, Colorado, is both
restrained and dramatic, and features lots of color--particularly
in the roofline, which is, variously, red, black, and green. It's
aggressively modern, sharp-angled, and geometric, yet classically
proportioned, more so than Sottsass at first realized. He and
Grawunder divided the structure into two sections, connected by
a glazed atrium; only later did he learn that such a configuration
was characteristic of ancient Pompeii. The dramatic Rocky Mountain
landscape is omnipresent, glimpsed through asymmetrical windows
and serving as a glorious backdrop to outdoor spaces that seem
almost as contained as the indoor ones.
"I consider building space as a story," he says. "Fabrics, materials,
these are words. You choose the words carefully to tell a story."
The tale he's told in the last few years can be Lewis Carroll-like--cheerfully
disorienting. The Amazon Express, a yacht by Sottsass and Marco
Zanini of Sottsass Associati, completed in 1995, with its taxi
yellow masts and pale green upper deck, must bring a smile to
those cruising by; an apartment in Rome (with project architect
Gianluigi Mutti), done the year before, with its curved custom
fittings, bright cubbyholes, and mast-like spiral staircase, looks
as though it should be shipboard. The Olabuenaga house (with project
architect Johanna Grawunder) on Maui indeed resembles an outsized
table, one that, from a distance, seems to have a stack of modular
structures in building-block colors beneath it. The colors are
key. So is the subliminal reference to childhood. A Sottsass house
is a playful structure, one that doesn't take itself seriously--for
better or for worse--at all.
In his buildings, Sottsass toys with our perceptions. If his furniture
and other objects seem like small architecture, there are times
when the converse is true. Many of his proj-ects, including the
red-roofed, pleasingly box-shaped Casa Cei in Tuscany (with Zanini
and architect Mike Ryan of Sottsass Associati), are as object-like
and compact as kitchen appliances--and, some critics contend, about
as sophisticated. He's fascinated with the concept of luogo, or
"place": that the space in and around a structure is as important
as the building itself. "Luogo is a place... already filled
with memories, visions. I consider architecture not as a monument,
not as a piece. I consider architecture just as the opening of
a place of possibility. Building is not so important. It's what
you prepare to the left of the building and the right of the building.
If you build a wall, the wall is there; it's not important, but
you invent places. There's the left of the wall, the right of
the wall."
Since Sottsass's architecture seems to have fewer adherents than
his industrial design, one wonders if perhaps he should think
less about space, more about walls. And yet his buildings, with
their striking hues, are uniquely his; he knows the power of color.
In his office, the impact of the bright red office chair on which
he sits seems to be diluted by the bland white of the (non-Mylar)
walls. Spend time in the room, though, and this bright spot seems
to intensify. Similarly, in his architecture, color has a way
of accruing importance. So do more intangible, and very Sottsassian,
qualities of humor and spirituality. It just takes a bit of time
to see them.
Curiously, Sottsass's vision seems to play as well in distant
cultures as it does nearer to home. The very idea of a Chinese
golf resort borders on the hilarious; one doesn't think of a former
workers' state having the time, or the money, for this sedentary
and--dare I say it?--silly-seeming sport. But the Sottsass-designed
Zhaoqing golf club and resort, now nearing completion, takes its
matter-of-fact place in this ancient Far Eastern landscape, and
is apparently quite at home. Sottsass adores China. "It's very
beautiful," he says. "It's very strange. It's the only country
today where you have a sense of wildness, physically and socially."
As usual, at the resort he has relied heavily on local materials,
incorporating enamel terra-cotta tiles and bricks in red, yellow,
and green--made in the traditional way, but in Sottsassian colors--into
the design.
"Ettore's philosophy is to use local technology, local materials,
to integrate the architecture with the site," says Federica Barbiero,
a partner on the project and an architect at his firm. The resistance
they encountered in China to using the regional tile was predictable,
she says. "It's difficult because everyone believes that local
materials are cheap. It's always a fight." The architecture that
has resulted (which includes the Prosperity Village houses on
the hill behind the clubhouse, also by Sottsass/
Barbiero) seems exotic in a familiar way--or is it vice versa?
Building in China has brought with it a sense of déjà vu. "In
China, it's like Naples," he tells me, referring to the unpredictability
of doing business there. "Nothing is sure. Everyone is nice, but
you never know what's happening."
For David Kelley and other clients, commissioning a house from
Sottsass promises to be a life-changing experience. When Kelley
first approached Sottsass, whom he's known for 15 years, about
doing a new house in Woodside, California, he recalls making him
"a book of all the things I thought were important. Who we are,
my wife and I, where we live now, the things that interest me.
I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I have old things around
the house, a Harley-Davidson in the living room, an old jukebox,
old 7-Up vending machines, that sort of thing." Sottsass's response
was unsettling. "The first thing Ettore said was, 'We can't have
any of those things in the house! Let's build a house so that
you're living in the present!' I said, 'If you can make me live
in the present by building me a house, go right ahead.' "
Whether or not Sottsass has succeeded, it's too soon to say, but
Kelley, for one, admires his nerve in trying. (Another client,
photographer Jean Pigozzi, who owns half a dozen houses by Sottsass
Associati in Europe and the United States, gave up his antiques
at the architect's insistence.) Such maneuvers, Kelley says, are
typically Sottsass. "He makes you think more. His point of view
is right on, but kind of messy. He makes you bigger than you dream."
About his glass vases, Sottsass once said he was trying to create
the sense that there was "a uniquely strange object in the room."
They are indeed extraordinary, brightly colored hybrids of sculpture
and laboratory glass with such names as "Black Hole" and "Sacred
Asparagus"--but this comment could apply to his other work as well.
His creations are unique, and, therefore, they endure. Even long-obsolete
machines, designed by the master, linger in the hearts of those
who care about good design. David Kelley raves about Sottsass's
mainframe. "His computers were so human. They had mouths and faces."
MOMA curator Paola Antonelli describes Olivetti's Valentine typewriter
as "little, sexy, fun, witty," and Paolo Polledri recalls the
fine design frenzy of typing his application to architecture school
on one.
For Polledri, Sottsass's investigations have an intellectual edge.
"It's his relentless pursuit of going back to the essence of things,
never taking anything for granted, never ceasing to question what
his work is about. It's easy to take what he does as an artistic
statement, but if you look at it, it's a sort of investigation
about forms and materials and about the place of objects in our
lives."
That investigation continues for Sottsass in his ninth decade.
Age doesn't seem to have changed his life much: besides his work
at Sott-sass Associati, he continues an active freelance life
and still spends time traveling the world, taking photographs
almost everywhere, particularly in India and China. What has changed
is his assessment of his own place in the world. "I feel this
nonsense in everything around me," he tells me, more than once.
"Young people are very aggressive and very presumptuous, and I
was one of them. I thought I knew everything. Now I know I know
nothing."
He describes his approach to life as "one that's been developed
over a thousand years by Vedic thinking." His advice to the rest
of the world? "Try to be nice. You know life is so funny--and so
stupid. Give up, and know every minute of your life that the whole
system is nonsense. Metaphysically, it's just nonsense." He sits
back from his desk, as inscrutable as a cat, and I notice for
the first time that all the pencils in a cylindrical holder on
his desk are colored ones, and only in shades of orange or yellow.
The reporter in me seizes on this tiny fact, determined to wring
some meaning, however minuscule, from it. But, then, Sottsass-like,
I let it float away. Across from me, the most famous designer
alive falls quiet for a while, then asks politely, but firmly,
"Can we stop now?" We do.
Penelope Rowlands, who writes frequently for Metropolis, is now a contributing
editor.
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