The Imaginative Creations of Ettore Sottsass
By Jill Vuchetich
Most often associated as the creator of the Memphis Group, Italian designer and architect Ettore Sottsass created work that spanned a variety of countercultural and innovative approaches. From giant nonfunctional ceramic objects to drawings of utopias created by the collapse of cities, Sottsass continually presented radical approaches and visions of design.
Archivist Jill Vuchetich, the head of Archives + Library at the Walker, looks back at the evolution of Sottsass’s career, reactions to his work, as well as its relationship to the Twin Cities.
Currently on view in Idea House 3 are objects by Ettore Sottsass and his collaborative design studio, the Memphis Group. Sottsass, a groundbreaking designer and architect, began his association with the Walker in 1973 with the exhibition Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes.
Ettore Sottsass, Jr. (1917–2007) was a maverick Italian designer and architect based in Milan who influenced post-World War II modern society with his designs for work, home, and information systems. He designed an award-winning typewriter, computer systems, modular workspaces, and office fixtures, including cabinets, chairs, lamps, and even telephones.
But Sottsass had another side of his practice, where he let his creativity flow without being tied to consumerism. In the late 1960s, Sottsass began making fantastical and whimsical drawings with no basis in reality and no commercial value. In his drawings, he presented outlandish ideas on what life could look like on our ailing planet. In other drawings, he imagined giant ceramic objects that were completely nonfunctional.
Intrigued by Sottsass’s drawings, Design Curator Mildred (Mickey) Friedman presented his work together with a younger group of radical designers from Italy, Superstudio, in the 1973 exhibition Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes. Together, Sottsass and Superstudio presented drawings, lithographs, and photographs of imaginary architectural futures for life on Earth.
The show followed another fantastical event at the Walker, Edible Architecture, by the Austrian group Haus-Rucker-Co in the Armory Gardens (Minneapolis Sculpture Garden) in 1971. Both Edible Architecture and Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes reflected the counterculture in architecture while also addressing the growing anxiety of modern urban life. This hit close to home; in the Twin Cities, for example, urban renewal was on the minds of residents and civic leaders who wrestled with what to do with broken downtowns and a polluted Mississippi River.
In 1971, Haus-Rucker-Co built downtown Minneapolis out of bread, cake, and other foods, in an artwork titled Food City I, and asked Minneapolitans to take a bite out of urban blight and remake the city by eating away at what was not working. For Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes, Ettore Sottsass, the leader of the Italian Radical Design movement, presented utopian ideas of what human existence would be like if cities collapsed completely.
Alternatively, the Italian radical group Superstudio, presented a future where wild places no longer existed at all; the Earth would become a giant city.
The exhibition gave visitors and critics a lot to ponder as they envisioned the future. Two prominent local art critics at the time, Roy M. Close and Mike Steele, took quite different views. Close took a dark, and pessimistic, view. Commenting on A Gigantic Work, a panoramic road for viewing the Irrawaddy River, Sottsass described it as being about the length of the Great Wall of China “but it’s a harmless, frail, useless great wall. One walks or cycles along it, stopping for picnics.” Close called it “fragile and unattractive.” He concluded in his review that the whole show was worth seeing, if nothing else than to make you think about the future. Close wrote:
“The interesting question posed by this show is not whether Sottsass and the Superstudio architects wish us to take their visions seriously, but whether their premises are in any way valid. If so – and if, as Sottsass writes, “production problems no longer exist,” – what is to prevent those visions from coming true?”
(The Minneapolis Star, Tuesday, August 21, 1973)
Mike Steele, on the other hand, took a brighter view. He wrote about Sottsass:
“Sottsass creates fantastic buildings that dispense waltzes, tangoes and cha-cha-cha stadiums from which to view the stars and the sea, roofs under which people can debate, rafts for listening to chamber music. He also presents wry ceramic objects such as tea pots and fruit bowls which redefine the way we view practical objects.”
He concluded, “This is very bold, very imaginative work and much needed stimulation to our own badly atrophied imagination.”(Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sunday, August 26, 1973)
The show succeeded in stimulating conversation. It had a long tour schedule, showing at six museums from New York to California. In 1975, Walker acquired a selection of lithographs including several from Sottsass’s The Planet as a Festival Series (1972) and The Giant Ceramics Series. The drawings were most recently on view in the major exhibition Hippie Modernism: the Struggle for Utopia, 2015.
In the years after creating these imaginary futures, Sottsass returned to making objects for consumer consumption, and in 1980 he founded the Memphis Group with several designers. Together, they created imaginative, whimsical, and colorful works for the home.
Sottsass’s passion was thinking up creations and making them real, whether it was a computer, a meandering covered road, or a lamp that looks vaguely like a cartoon duck. In his biography for the 1973 Design Quarterly issue, Sottsass mused over how designers can create functional pieces and useless imaginative drawings at the same time. He wrote, “Whatever we did was rewarded by the very act of doing it, by the desire to do it; and anything that was done was, after all, part of one extraordinary sphere only: life.”Design Quarterly 89, Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes, Walker Art Center, 1973.▪︎
Experience the work of Sottsass and the entire Memphis Group in Idea House 3 through summer 2024.
