Audio guide
Io sono un architetto. Ettore Sottsass

The work of Ettore Sottsass over this thirty-year period unveils a long and still relatively little-known creative trajectory, one that is extremely profound and fascinating, and that reveals a host of links and intersections with the Tuscany region, with Pistoia, Montelupo, Pisa, and Massa. For it was here that Sottsass began his path to becoming a designer: with Poltronova, with Bitossi ceramics, which Olivetti, for which he designed computers with the University of Pisa and created furniture at Synthesis in Massa.

All of these seemingly strange and unconnected projects are in fact connected by an approach that was quite clear to Sottsass: the architectural approach to design. That same design that he absorbed and explored in university, at the Faculty of Architecture. Though many have considered him a poet, painter, or artist, Sottsass always viewed himself as an architect: someone who designs things, with a set of initial preconditions and the vision of a goal to achieve.

But this goal need not always coincide with bricks, windows, arches or architraves. It might be the ability to construct depth with light, shadow, or colour; or the desire to create an emotion, a sense of belonging to a place and the importance of our role within it. Quite simply, this was Sottsass’s way of understanding design, of understanding the profession, of understanding architecture.

And this is the lesson Sottsass leaves us: the possibility of interpreting one’s profession not as a bounded, limited perimeter, but as a window open onto the infinite, onto the unknown; the possibility of practicing one’s profession with new and different materials. It’s a question of giving things a different meaning, of turning the tables on the expected, of generating surprise: perhaps this is the greatest lesson to emerge from the work of Ettore Sottsass.

And by rummaging through his drawers, memories and forgotten pages, this exhibition revives and restores an idea of Ettore Sottsass’s intense creative activity, of an imagination constantly at work, and of his ability to change the terms of the discussion, give daily experience a new colour, and give life an unexpected depth.

This is the English version of the audio guide, created in collaboration with the exhibition curator, Enrico Morteo. Morteo’s words accompany visitors throughout the exhibition.

Each room is introduced by a dedicated track, and select rooms include extra tracks offering short in-depth insights.

Enjoy the exhibition.

Ettore Sottsass was an architect’s son. He was the son of an architect who was born in the Trentino region and educated in Vienna, in the years around the turn of the 20th century, in that atmosphere of the Viennese Secession when modernity revealed itself with extreme elegance and grace: a refined revolution, you might say.

But in 1928, when Ettore Sottsass was eleven years old, his family moved to Turin, which at the time was Italy’s most modern city, the great centre of industry, and there he was exposed to a far more innovative style of architecture: Rationalism, the clear, pure, and far colder architecture of function.

This transition was in some ways a disappointment to his father, but for young Ettore it was a decidedly negative change, and throughout his life he would nurture a nostalgia for the forests of the Trentino region, its warmer, more intimate atmosphere, the smell of hay, that privileged relationship with nature. Immediately clear to him, and becoming even more so when he began his formal studies in the field, was his rejection of the rigorous approach and aesthetics of functional architecture.

He would look elsewhere, outside of the traditional tools of the profession, for something to help him recreate that sense of warmth, of life, of welcoming intimacy that he had somehow left behind in his youth. It was the beginning of a journey that guided him towards art, where he sought in light and in colour the materials, modes and approaches capable of restoring what the rigour of rationality had taken away.

During his architecture studies, he made the acquaintance of one of Turin’s important painters at the time, Enrico Paulucci, who would guide him, counsel him, provide him with both encouragement and a sense of limits, and who introduced him to the most important examples of contemporary European art and architecture. Sottsass would go to Paris, attend exhibitions, get to know the paintings of Picasso, see Guernica: he gained exposure, in other words, to a world beyond that of simple architectural design.

This was the trajectory that characterised his early years, and it is the subject of this first room of the exhibition. As soon as you walk in, the wall to the left of the door is entirely dedicated to abstract compositions: they are free experimentation, explorations seeking to set down on paper and reconstruct in ink and colour an impulse, an emotion, a sensation of life.

But the most interesting aspect is that the room’s other walls have very similar compositions, despite the fact that they’re designs, many for fabrics. The entire wall that begins with number 7 and continues towards 14, 15, 16 , etc. is composed of fabric designs; yet there is very little difference between these designs and the previous examples of free artistic exploration. They’re superimposable to some extent, interchangeable.

Displayed on the opposite wall, on the other hand, are designs for carpets. What’s the difference? Practically speaking, there is none. Sottsass doesn’t flee architecture to throw himself into the arms of art; indeed, he attempts to do the opposite: absorb the modes, approaches and tools of art, bring them into architecture and turn them into design.

This approach, this attitude, which would remain with him all his life, heavily influenced these first fifteen years of his career, more or less until the mid-1960s, when, with the occasion of an exhibition in Florence at Galleria Il Quadrante, he parted ways, so to speak, with the paths of artistic exploration. The most colourful work in this room, a painting entitled Bandiera di morte (“Flag of Death”) and identified with number 27, already effectively marks this distance, this road travelled from his first drawings, his first temperas: from the freedom of his early research to this blocked, almost rigid composition. It’s a painting style that’s closer, not necessarily to graphic art, but to a very intense symbolism. There’s no longer room for emotion as such; this is the construction of a direct message within a strongly impinging geometry.

In the catalogue for that 1964 Florentine exhibition at Galleria Il Quadrante, Sottsass writes: “I am no longer a painter. The truth of the matter is that painting is merely a stratagem, a trick to try to fend off death”.

And death is an element of which he was extremely conscious throughout his life, due to the fact that at one point he suffered from a serious illness – a theme we’ll return to in a later room — but also because life has meaning only in its stark contrast with death. Only if we’re aware of this do we feel more alive. And an important phase in Ettore Sottsass’s formative years was the war.

It’s no coincidence that this display case with pillows is here: the fabrics the pillows are made from came from Montenegro. Sottsass spent part of World War II as a soldier in Albania and Montenegro, and he developed a passion for the construction of colour in Montenegrin fabrics. The first designs in this display case are less copies of fabrics than they are diagrams: diagrams of colour, of rhythm almost. In some ways they are nearly pieces of music, more than designs as such.

This idea of producing rhythm through colour, of alternating light and dark to construct a narrative that traverses not just light, but shadow and time, would remain a key creative concept throughout Sottsass’s life.

Amid the many abstract designs are several drawings that might appear slightly out of place – some of the few nods to naturalism on display in this room. They’re bunches of flowers, they’re intriguing, and a few are dedicated to Nanda.

This Nanda was Fernanda Pivano, the woman Sottsass would eventually marry, but with whom he first crossed paths when he was quite young, winning her over practically the first time they met. She was preparing a play, and he had won the Littoriali school competition in the set design category. So she tracked him down, called him up, and invited him over in the hopes of convincing him to collaborate on her play.

He showed up at her door: he was the son of an architect who certainly wasn’t poor, but was still trying to establish himself, while Fernanda was the daughter of a powerful banker, a wealthy member of the social elite. Ettore stepped foot into a house full of lace, curtains, Baroque-style furniture, thick tablecloths, and powerful fragrances, because it was a house full of flowers. So he came inside and, with an air of slight indifference, asked her: “So what exactly do you want from me? Why are you bothering with the theatre, Miss? You’re the daughter of rich, bourgeois family, let it go”.

She told him the whole story, and explained what she hoped he could contribute, but he said: “Look, I’m not sure about this, and I really have to go. Plus this smell of all these flowers is giving me an awful headache”. She walked him to the door and, in a final burst of the polite manners typical of a girl of good upbringing, she said: “Yes, of course. But listen, there’s going to be a party tomorrow, it’s my birthday. If by any chance you’d like to come …” To which he replied: “I really don’t see any chance of that happening”, and strode off with his tuft of blonde hair and charming expression.

The following day, however, as Nanda was getting ready for the party, surrounded by all the flowers she’d received for her birthday, the maid, a girl who saw to her needs – as was the custom then for girls from wealthy families – came over to her and said: “A really strange young man just came by, soaking wet from the rain. He left this package wrapped in newspaper: it looks like flowers, but I can’t say for sure. Should I throw it away?” “No, let me see”.

She set the wet package down on the table and opened it, revealing a bunch of wildflowers that looked as though they’d been ripped from a hedge, but that were as gorgeous as a Dufy painting. Naturally she fell in love with him and his flowers on the spot, as opposed to the many fancy bouquets with which her other suitors had paid their respects.

In the room are these small drawings, at number 2: a series of bunches of flowers for Nanda. Another large bunch of flowers is at the centre of the room, flowers that become almost fireworks, explosions of colour. The biggest painting in the room, however, is a large tempera on paper representing a seafloor. I don’t think anyone can distinguish a single seashell down there, but they might very well recognise the ingenious idea of a ray of sunlight passing through the water and striking the bottom of the sea.

In the second room, Sottsass had come back from the war. When the Yugoslav campaign ended and the armistice was signed, he faced the choice of opting out of the war and being sent to a concentration camp in Germany, or continuing in the army, now under German control. Seeing as it would mean moving closer to home, to Italy, he decided to continue his military service for what was now the Italian Social Republic. He was detached to the Monterosa Division and spent the last two years of the war on the Gothic Line, amidst the Apuan Alps, defending a front that no one was even sure actually existed.

This was a choice, however, that ensured he wouldn’t exactly be welcomed home with open arms: after all, he had chosen to stick with the fascists to the very end. Consequently he struggled to find work, find opportunities; his father, who had stopped working during the war, encountered similar problems. The family went through difficult times, so young Ettore did what he could. He certainly didn’t rest on his laurels, but began working with the materials available to him, small metal wire, thin sheets of aluminium. At the kitchen table he folded, cut, fit together, and fastened with laundry clips, inventing shapes, using these simple materials not so much as training for any particular purpose, but as a means of exploring the consistency of space.

How can matter interfere with space? How can a material play with light? It can be opaque and block it, or be cut into little strips and allow the light’s rays to pass through, traverse it, and thus, to some extent, gain control over that light.

He began doing these things, but – and this is important – he did so with the approach of an architect, thinking in terms of design, combining elements, not merely shaping a form as though it were modelling clay. This is evident in the vases to the left as we enter the room, they’re incredibly light structures with very geometric, regular metal wiring, either containing or supporting small glass or crystal receptacles.

We also see it in the lamps positioned above – particularly numbers 2, 3, and 5 – photographs of lampshades made with delicacy, with sheets of aluminium cut out with scissors and assembled with practically nothing. It’s do-it-yourself that doesn’t stop at mere know-how: it’s an experiment to study the material’s consistency, most certainly, but, as I was saying, it’s also a means of exploring the consistency of empty space.

High up on the wall, at number 22, you’ll find a series of photographs. They’re small models, 3-D forms, abstract figures he made precisely to evaluate the consistency of space. To see what happens when I introduce a line, a figure, or a small rectangle into a void; to see how light hits a curved surface, and how it wraps around an almost-plastic sculpture that resembles an amoeba.

The material is not the end of the work, but rather a means of learning something more, as always, about space, which is the central theme in Sottsass’s research. He then moved from this research to making by hand something a little less artisanal: a small Milanese industrialist asked him to create objects with anodised aluminium, resulting in a series of bizarre figures. Displayed at number 10 are an ice bucket and a smoking set, a snuff box and then some cigarette holders, an ashtray. It’s immediately obvious they were designed not by an “artist”, but by an architect. Because as strange as it looks, as much as it resembles a space station ready for deployment on Mars, the ice bucket is a construction, a built object, not something just thrown together seemingly at random.

The walls here are covered with these designs, these explorations, with surfaces held up by extremely thin structures that begin to define forms that would recur and reappear, composing Sottsass’s visual vocabulary.

The lamps that Angelo Lelii, an industrialist from Monza with a little company named Arredoluce, would ask him to design are even less artisanal in nature. One is on display here, a colourful tube with a funnel on either end: one that looks upwards and one that functions as a base. But, once again, there’s rhythm too. We were talking before, looking at the Montenegrin fabrics, about how colour is rhythm, and not merely expression. I think that’s clearly visible here.

In the lamps that are sketched in small drawings on the wall, too, we clearly see this evolution from his earliest designs towards a greater refinement, though certain stylistic features return: the simple metal caps and little metal-wire legs are quite similar to those he designed early on.

A key area that highlights Sottsass’s way of designing the world with his hands is jewellery, and his research in this realm would continue for many years. We’ve dedicated most of a wall to his jewels, though, truth be told, we grouped them together with his embroidery work, due to the fact that they bear a certain resemblance to one another. At the upper right is a paper pattern of a skirt with embroidery, and beneath it are pendants, earrings, rings, brooches: a world of small objects staged together.

But it’s important to underline that it is never a question of blending things together, but rather an arranging, a summing of small, distinct elements. This is evident in the display case at the centre of the wall, containing two chokers and a ring, where the approach evokes the way children string beads together to make a necklace. But this isn’t children’s string, it’s gold thread; and these are kids’ beads, they’re ivory, ebony, lapis lazuli, and they’re disks, and they’re precise, and they’re rigorous, and once more they create rhythm, a precise cadence.

Ettore Sottsass designed a great many jewels and they would be an important theme, partly because they were meant for women, who for him, well, let’s say they represented a place of discovery and surprise. He was a man with an immense love of life, of women, and of the thrilling adventures that all of that entailed.

While he was working for the small Milanese aluminium company Rinnovel, he met an American merchant named Irving Richards. Richards travelled the world in search of high-quality artisanal objects to sell on the American market. He felt that American companies had lost the ability to produce sufficiently refined and elegant pieces, so he went to Mexico, Italy, Spain and France, purchasing items he would then sell to upscale retailers back home.

When he met Sottsass and saw his work, he told him: “Listen, why don’t you try making ceramics? I’ll introduce you to Bitossi, in Montelupo Fiorentino”. So in 1955-1956 Sottsass came to Tuscany and took his first steps in a world totally foreign to him, where he crossed paths with two things, so to speak, that would leave an indelible mark on his life. The first was actually a person: Aldo Londi, the artistic director at Ceramiche Bitossi, who would act his guide as he familiarised himself with a new material: ceramic, terracotta. The second thing was this material itself, terracotta, which would become a marvellous experimental workshop for him, the ideal place for transferring the two-dimensional ideas he had expressed in painting into space, into three dimensions.

We’ve attempted to bring together and illustrate this three-dimensional oeuvre on the large table located at the centre of the room. As you walk in, you’ll see a small date on the table, 1955, and beyond it is a vase, a tall, narrow cylinder engraved with a multitude of markings. That was the first piece of ceramic Sottsass created in Bitossi’s kilns, and beside it is a low container with a cover decorated with lines and colourful brushstrokes, in dark green, black and yellow.

There’s a clear progression in these early vases, and it moves clockwise, to the left, from 1955. Notice how the first vases are works on ceramic. I’m placing colour on ceramic, I’m placing marks on ceramic, I’m engraving it. It’s a medium that displays Sottsass’s ideas of colour and rhythm. Be we also see how different the ceramics are on the other side, where the date is 1963, marking the approximate end of our tour around the tabletop. Ceramic is no longer a medium here. It’s as though Sottsass had decided to work in ceramic, rather than on it, to construct volume, to shape volume through colour. There’s fullness, continuity, a far more determined intent to interfere with space.

In roughly eight years, he and Aldo Londi changed the modes and rules of contemporary ceramics in quite radical fashion. Their pieces ceased to be decorative objects and became constructive objects, objects participating in defining a space. This is clear on the table’s upper levels as well, where the forms become very simple and rigorous, and the technique changes. They’re what’s called collage ceramics, an approach requiring tiny moulds – there are three wooden examples on the table. The potter’s wheel has been abandoned for what we might call a more industrial technique.

Sottsass continued to work with ceramic for the rest of his life. It remained an ideal field for experimentation, for testing out new figures, new forms, new opportunities in design.

We have laid out this lengthy adventure on the walls, including a great many sketches, because what interested us was displaying not just the final vase – the end of the journey – but rather what lay behind it, the designs he made, many of which may not have become anything at all, but where an apparent mistake might in fact lead to a fortunate discovery that enjoyed lasting success. While the vase, on other hand, which you’d expect to be more conventional and enduring, ends up not having a future and being quickly forgotten.

Four full walls covered by seemingly small drawings, and yet each one contains a little piece of a world that, taken together, combine to compose this great adventure. As I said before, Sottsass began designing ceramics for Irving Richards, who imported them to America with his company, Raymor. But he was also contacted by two Milanese sisters who decided to found a small company to provide business gifts, objects that large companies could offer their customers or executives on special occasions. When they approached Sottsass, he responded: “You know, why do we need to look for these objects somewhere else? Let’s design them ourselves, make them ourselves”.

So he soon began designing both for Richards and for the Scarzella sisters’ Galleria Il Sestante in Milan. The American market would gradually be abandoned, but he designed a huge number of items for the Milanese gallery over many years. Nearly half of the items on the tabletop, and the upper levels as well, were ceramics designed for Galleria Il Sestante.

Yet Sottsass’s first exhibition in Milan, in 1958 at Il Sestante, did not focus on vases, but rather on works in copper. And the wall on the right as you enter the room is covered in gorgeous decorated copper plates, together with their related sketches, which were the designs provided to the artisan who would produce them. These plates are paintings in space, beautiful, colourful, and incredibly seductive. Are they paintings? Are they plates? Do they do anything? They certainly elicit strong emotions, and I think this was really the goal that Ettore Sottsass set for himself.

On a large, low platform in a corner on the opposite side of the room is a group of almost astonishingly large ceramic objects. In 1964 Sottsass began thinking that ceramics wasn’t just a matter of small objects for tabletops, but needed to be something that interfered with the environment, that interacted with spaces, volumes, the places we inhabit. So he began thinking about and designing large-scale ceramics.

Now large-scale ceramics are difficult to execute, far more so than their normal-size counterparts, because the larger the piece, the greater the strains that develop during both baking and, particularly, when the piece is drying and is removed from the kiln. Its likelihood of cracking increases greatly. Additionally, the manipulation of these elements, which must be modular, fitting one on top of another – you can’t make single-piece ceramic columns, pillars or totem poles, they must be assembled from smaller parts – requires a masterful control of form.

It would take Sottsass a few years, but in 1967 he managed to produce a series of these large-scale elements that he exhibited at Gian Enzo Sperone’s gallery in Milan. Here, a series of photographs recounts a bit of the atmosphere at this Milanese exhibition space, and effectively conveys the interference, so to speak, that the chromatic explosion of these large elements he called totem poles brought to the empty space of the room.

That same year, the exhibition was replicated at Genoa’s Galleria Bertesca and, later, at Poltronova’s showroom in Agliana, where Sottsass was feted not only by Sergio Cammilli, the company’s founder, but by Allen Ginsberg, great poet of the American counterculture and friend of Sottsass and particularly his wife, Fernanda Pivano. It was a sort of monumental happening, which must have been quite astounding in such a bucolic country setting, with the hippy-like presence of these objects, somewhere between the ritual, the symbolic and the magical. The sort of adventure, in short, that was still possible in the 1960s.

We now leave behind this explosion of ceramic colour and step into another very colourful room, entirely dedicated to interiors. Designing with surfaces, the interior space as workshop. And it truly was: for Sottsass, domestic living and interior design focused much less on grand architectural ideas than on rooms, which were really significant spaces for him.

We were discussing it earlier: the rules of Rationalist architecture were insufficient to narrate, to express and condense what Sottsass wanted from architecture. For Sottsass the home is always an inhabited place: more than a surface or a space, it’s a place of emotions, fears, hopes, dreams, of people’s desires. It was impossible to think neutrally about a house, and as early as university his thinking on the subject was already far from neutral.

Number 1 here identifies a group of drawings, which I think are gorgeous, that Sottsass made during his final year at the Faculty of Architecture, in 1939-40, for an exam on furnishings. He used Miró-style colours, with certain Hockney-like details that almost seem to anticipate what would transpire years later. These beautiful drawings depict straw chairs, small tables, and what resembles a design diagram for a chair with metal legs and wooden armrests. Sottsass didn’t pass the exam, however, the commission rejected the drawings, telling him: “Listen, Sottsass, come back with less artistic drawings. We’re architects here, you know, not artists”.

But it wasn’t so much a matter of being an artist as it was, and I’ve already mentioned this, of bringing something more to design: not changing it to something else, but giving it something more, enriching it. And this comes through quite clearly in the designs on the walls here. There’s a black-and-white photograph of an interior that’s inhabited, so to speak, by a wooden framework that in practice delimits a living room. This is the first house Sottsass designed for himself in Milan, and it’s his living room. Yet again, this structure is providing a rhythm to the space. It’s just a few fir beams, nothing complex, it’s not a wall, it’s nothing, really, and yet you could hang a painting on this little framework that opens or closes a view. It’s a rhythm dictated by these presences, more than a constructed space – you could almost call it a virtual space.

But the designs beside it tell a story that’s deeply important to him. When a space is inhabited, it needs to be surrounded by meaningful walls. And he constructed the walls of a home as if they were paintings. Each element is precisely identified, precisely positioned, inserted in a composition that contains it and all the others in an orderly overall design, because a wall is a composition, a unit, and each wall is constructed as if it were a painting.

These designs in the display, numbers 28 and 29, were almost all used in the pages of Domus, the magazine Domus directed by Gio Ponti, which for Ettore Sottsass was a crucial creative outlet: it welcomed his drawings, his designs, as well as many of his ideas. His ideas about interior design were theoretical ideas. And he put into words, he said many times and published articles specifically to say how he intended to construct these walls, within which the furniture represented a rhythm inside a rhythm. There was no separation between the object and architecture, it was part of the same whole.

This is very clear in the photographs above as well, which portray two subsequent versions of Ettore Sottsass’s apartment, two years apart, 1958 and 1960. The domestic environment here is a veritable set: it’s assembled with fabrics he collected on his travels and carpets he designed himself, the tables, the furnishings, the colour fields, the wall hangings, combining to produce a whole that’s full of meaning and full of life. And this, in a certain way, is what the four walls in the room convey.

This wall is almost entirely dedicated to Sottsass’s homes; ahead of us to the right, on the other hand, where there’s a yellow chair that he designed early on for a Milanese competition and a small table, is a space dedicated to the homes he designed for others, but his spirit in doing so was the same. And in fact it’s quite difficult to distinguish the apartment photographed at number 19 from his own home. The visual language is absolutely identical. It’s a phantasmagoria of colours, rhythms, paintings, art, all contained in very precise designs. There’s no randomness, no inventing furnishings for no particular reason: it’s a precise staging.

The other two walls tell two different stories, quite interesting in their own right. The one topped by several black-and-white photographs, numbers 13 and 14, telling the story of the atrium of the 12th Milan Triennale, shows how a public place – since that’s what the Triennale’s atrium was – could be designed and imagined exactly like a domestic interior: the couches, the paintings on the walls, environments of the highest quality, from a certain standpoint, and that were entirely unusual in what were considered public spaces. The drawings below recount this scrupulousness, this study. In some, he actually drew in the couches, plants, tables; and if we look at these little sketches, this little drawings, we grasp what we might call the domestic quality of this large space, displaying a degree of care and detail that designs of such places usually don’t possess.

In the corner, beneath a series of intense watercolours, grids, red splotches, the entire display marked number 12 contains a series of preparatory studies for the design of a simple logo for the Triennale itself, a design that would go into letterhead, business cards, entrance tickets. Yet even for such simple objects, Sottsass once again turned to art in seeking the meaning, logic and idea for his designs.

The final wall, which brings us back beside the room’s entranceway, contains numbers 2 through 6 and is entirely dedicated to the work Sottsass did for a 1965 Florentine exhibition called La casa abitata, “The Inhabited Home”. In the space he was allotted, he decided to design, to imagine, to conceive a “Room for Making Love”. But he was immediately censured, this title could not be used, it was scrapped, and the space was eventually called a “Bedroom”. The difference is quite subtle, and Sottsass thinks of it in almost Asian terms, where making love means constructing a situation, a space of extreme pleasantness. The photographs display a guitar, some fruit, soft pillows, and we can almost smell the incense. This is what making love means: creating a general harmony, which may be with another person, but may also be with the cosmos, or even simply with oneself.

This was what he intended with this idea, this image, and it contains a special detail that’s extremely interesting and seductive as well, it’s a frieze that runs at the juncture between the walls and the ceiling. It’s clearly visible in a drawing in the centre of the lower display, number 3, and it’s immediately recognisable: there’s a person, a large central circle which is a mandala, and then this large frieze above which is an interplay of colours and symbols, almost a small, private cosmogony, a small window, a glimpse onto the universe. The studies for this frieze are a series of colourful drawings that stand out in the middle of the wall. Now he made all these drawings with the aim of eventually producing something, and sometimes the final result was much simpler, much more concise, much more distilled, but only because you’d already invested so much imagination, so much colour in the sketches that preceded the final work.

The entire room revolves around a central, illuminated element that represents a very significant, important project for Sottsass, from a conceptual an design standpoint but also on a human level. It’s the apartment that Ettore Sottsass designed for Mario Tchou in Milan. Mario Tchou was the engineer with whom Sottsass worked while Olivetti was producing the first Italian computer; it was Mario Tchou, in fact, who designed its inner workings. They became friends, establishing a personal, human relationship that went beyond the professional sphere. And for his friend Sottsass designed this Milanese apartment, though unfortunately Mario Tcou would never actually live in it, since his life was cut tragically short by a car accident on the Turin-Milan highway in 1961.

This was a home that had an extremely awkward layout. It has a sort of head – it’s visible in number 33, which is actually a window in this central lantern – and then a long tail composed of rooms, toilets, kitchens, bathrooms, culminating in a strange dining room in the least likely place in the house. What Sottsass does is empty out the entranceway, which was made up of a series of small spaces, service areas, these nearly forgotten spaces in the corner that connects this entrance to the tail, and transform it into a fluid space that revolves around a vertical, columnar module that’s clearly visible in the photographs, with a small Chinese child sitting at the desk, and which would be a crucial element in Sottsass’s approach to designing homes.

There it is, it’s in front of us we come in through the door, we see it clearly: it’s a totem pole, not a ceramic totem pole like the ones we saw in the previous room, but one made of wood. It was produced by Poltronova, with which Sottsass was beginning a long collaboration, and it’s an intersection, a focal point of the space, important for the space where it’s physically located, but also providing movement to all the space around it.

We’ve already mentioned Sottsass’s dissatisfaction with Rationalist architecture. This fifth room is small, it’s narrow, we imagined it like a painting collection with only a few subjects, because the principal theme is that of doubt, of uncertainty, of providing architecture with a different meaning – the one that did interest Sottsass.

We settled on two topics. When Sottsass began working again in the years following the Second World War, the late 1940s and early 1950s, his efforts would be concentrated largely on public projects: low-income housing, schools, nurseries, those structures necessary for a country emerging from war and attempting to re-establish normal life.

The wall on the right as you walk in is dedicated to a project for an elementary school that Sottsass designed in Sardinia, in Siliqua, a town near Cagliari. We recognise it because it’s composed of views, of designs – today we’d call them renderings – beautiful watercolours depicting children in odd situations, where what’s truly important is not space but place. What matters is the shadow cast by an awning, the plants that form a corner where people can gather, a pergola that seems to indicate a place to stop and rest, and is exactly that.
Interestingly, on one of these drawings, number 2, Sottsass writes the following words: “During classes outdoors, the sense of freedom that arises due to the presence of nature strips teaching of any suspicion of coercion, and creates an easy, pleasant, intimate connection between teachers and students”.

Here was an architect who designed situations rather than spaces, who designed relationships, and I think this is the greatest, most intense characteristic of Ettore Sottsass’s way of thinking. The wall concludes with a few quite irregular blueprints, with few right angles, and centres around a strange drawing, which is the design of a decoration for a tablecloth, but which, if you look closely, turns out to be a sort of architecture in the landscape, with small buildings arranged amidst a dynamic natural setting.

The opposite wall, on the other hand, is dedicated to architectural designs characterised by thin vaulting. What is thin vaulting? They’re ceilings and surfaces made of reinforced concrete, but they look as though they’re composed of lightweight sheets. These sheets, of course, are made of concrete, and yet they have this incredibly soft shape, their strength generated not by the presence of pillars but by the form of the vault itself. This idea let Sottsass imagine structures that escape the prison of the right angle and adopt more naturalistic ideas, almost an immersion in the landscape, disappearing in the environment, opening themselves up to the sky. An architecture of freedom: in the final analysis, this is what Ettore Sottsass wanted, and what he struggled to achieve throughout his life.

We’ve now crossed Palazzo Buontalenti’s courtyard and entered the second half of the exhibition, and we’ve actually left Pistoia, we’re in Agliana now. Why is that? Well, when Ettore Sottsass was living in Milan, he had a chance encounter with a painter from Pistoia, Agenore Fabbri, who said, “Listen, a friend of mine, a person I know in Agliana, has founded a little furniture production company and he’s looking for an art director. Why don’t you throw your name in the hat? Go talk to him”.

So Sottsass went to Agliana, he met Sergio Camilli, who himself was a bit eccentric, more artist than businessman by training, and the two clearly clicked and liked one another, so Sottsass began this new adventure. An adventure for which he was exquisitely unprepared, seeing as he had no experience in producing furnishings and little in designing them. But he approached the task with the enthusiasm of someone who had just been to America, and who had had the good fortune of spending several weeks at the firm of George Nelson, an important architect close to Charles Eames. This was a group of architects who, in the mid-1950s, were dreaming of an American utopia of joy, a sort of liberation of the middle class, which they curiously thought could be achieved through industrial production, as though industry could offer objects that truly improved people’s lives.

Well, we know that industry actually cares more about its own interests and revenues than it does about other people’s happiness, so the utopia of Nelson and Eames could only go so far. Yet this approach of designing simply, with linearity, coherent with the modes of industrial production, lingered in Sottsass’s mind for a time, and he freed himself of that handicrafts mentality we saw him experiment with in the early 1950s and tried something different.

And looking at the display with numbers 4,5,7 and 8 we see a series of very linear, very simple furnishings: rods, small grids. They look like simple things to make. Sottsass actually imagined them all painted with aniline, which meant they would have to be painted before being assembled, but when they’d been assembled, they would get scratched and have to be taken apart, touched up and reassembled. Not an efficient process. But he had this idea of lightness, of calm, that also appears in the design of the Poltronova showroom we see above. All the photographs at number 9 are actually pages from Domus, whose importance for Sottsass’s work we’ve already mentioned. Gio Ponti published practically everything he did: words, ideas, designs. And there’s this sense of serenity, of lightness, of relaxation, if you will.

Soon, however, he’d add to this idea of relaxation a subtle sense of irony. Both the Tempus console table, which we see at number 1 as soon as we come, in beside the door, and the chest of drawers that welcomes you, the Bastonio — no mistaking it, it’s the only one in the room – are fundamentally traditional pieces of furniture, they’re not revolutionary. Yet there’s something in them that goes beyond the normal: the mirror is slightly anthropomorphic, the rods that function as drawer handles are frankly a bit excessive, they go beyond mere normality. And that orange is really loud. There’s a little dose of irony in these pieces Sottsass was designing for Camilli – they were extremely normal, and just a tad extraordinary.

This comes through quite clearly in the photographs above the chest of drawers, from 12 to 11 – 11 was the catalogue used to present these pieces of furniture in a Milanese showroom named Centro Fly, in fact this collection is called Mobili Fly – but both the designs and the photographs recount furniture designed, at least in part, to amuse. Number 14 is a series of tiny drawings, of little furnishings with lots of eyes or lots of buttons, or lots of hair standing straight up. Like a series of slightly bizarre and funny characters. As was always the case in Sottsass’ work, there’s something more than mere functionality in this furniture.

These pieces date to 1965, which was the same year that Sottsass design – and proposed to Camilli – a far more radical object that stands tall here in the middle of the room. It’s called Superbox. He made lots of designs of them, and on the wall behind the Superbox we see not just small models, but also many different designs and possible solutions. They’re simple wardrobes, cubes planted in space, but they’re covered in a colourful plastic laminate, and they’re quite symbolic, almost conceptual, as far as wardrobes go.

In 1965, they were probably still just a bit too futuristic. Who know how many would have been sold in 1968, 1969, or 1970? Camilli was unsure, he was a little scared by the harshness, the simplicity of these pieces, and he decided not to produce them. The one we see in the middle of the room, in fact, is a much later reedition, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Ettore Sottsass was contacted by Roberta Meloni, who had taken over at Poltronova in more recent years, and they agreed to revive this forgotten design that had been unlucky decades earlier.

Enjoying better fortunes, on the other hand, was the Cubirolo, which appears on the room’s final wall, crowned by three photographs that shows enlargements of its handle. It was actually a very simple piece, in white plastic laminate, modular, basically a series of boxes placed next to one another. Yet this handle, which resembles an eye, somehow takes this piece of furniture somewhere else, or at least allows us to imagine being in a slightly more magical, more extraordinary world.

To enter this seventh room is, from a certain standpoint, to enter another world. It’s no coincidence that we chose to make the walls this intense blue, a blue reminiscent of the heavens, even those depictions of the heavens with gold-leaf backgrounds that enjoyed such popularity in Siena, Florence and Pistoia. We have entered the cosmos, it is a cosmos full of hope and full of fear.

In 1961 Ettore Sottsass organised a trip to India for him and his wife Fernanda Pivano, an itinerary he planned on his own, without the aid of a travel agency. He simply went to Air India’s office in Milan and chose the flights to get from here to there and back. The trip would take him to India, Nepal, Bali, a whole series of destinations.

This voyage had a profound influence on him. Visiting Asia help him discover new ways of feeling, new ways of living, new ways of seeing, new ways of occupying space, new ways of participating in the passage of time. It was an intense experience. And all the more so since, whether because of the vaccines he got before departing or a bacillus he picked up during the trip, upon his return to Italy he discovered he was seriously ill.

He had contracted nephritis, a disease that seemed incurable and that no one in Italy knew how to treat. He spent several months in a clinic in Milan, with no progress, until Roberto Olivetti, whom Sottsass worked for, took the situation in hand and put him in touch with an American luminary who was travelling in Europe at the time, and who just happened to be in the process of developing, testing out a cure for nephritis based on particularly high doses of cortisone. There was no time to waste: Sottsass reserved an ambulance, a plane ticket, a room at the hospital where the doctor worked – Stanford University Medical Centre, in Palo Alto, California – and off he went, accompanied by Fernanda Pivano, between March and April 1962. He stayed at this hospital room for two months, subjecting himself to this experimental, cortisone-based treatment.

Now today the use of cortisone has become relatively routine, but at the time it was highly experimental and doctors were just starting to figure out how to regulate its dosage. And the doses Sottsass was taking were very high. He experienced a state of excitement, of permanent overexcitement, because this is what cortisone induces, with swings between the most extreme emotions: fear of death, hope for a cure, despondency, deep terror. They alternated back and forth during the long nights marked only by the purple lights over the patients’ beds, bells that rang when someone wasn’t feeling well, flashes of light as doors opened and closed. All of this settled into a series of images that Sottsass set down in a few small, artisanal publications he created.

He said, “We’re making this little fanzine to keep the people back in Italy up to date. We send them some little mimeographs, rather than writing each person a letter or postcard”, and these sheets became the depository of these intense emotions. We’ve placed a few of them here just as you come in, on a display that also contains a very unique vase: a cylinder with simple circular signs on it.

This vase is part of a series of ceramics that Sottsass created on his return from this adventure. Fortunately, in fact, the American doctor’s treatment was successful. And, almost to free himself from the images that had besieged him to such a degree during his hospitalization, Sottsass created these seventy ceramic pieces, of which he commented, “I know they’re just vases, but I’d like for them to access a magical dimension, go beyond the simple utility of holding flowers”. He designed them in a heavily ritualistic manner: they’re all circular, identical vases, differing only in height, while the diameter and proportions remain the same. The colours are platinum, silver, absolute white, orange bubbles, deep blue bubbles, lots of black. They’re ceramics of darkness, ceramics of this moment of fear, but, from a certain perspective, they’re also about liberation.

After designing these seventy vases, which he presented at Galleria Il Sestante in Milan – and the entire wall above the vase is dedicated to the invitation to the exhibition, to the small publication he created for that occasion – he also produced a series of plates dedicated to Shiva. Shiva is the Indian god of life and rebirth, of destruction and reconstruction, he is, in a certain way, the god of creation. Sottsass designed these plates, actually he created them, because he literally sat on the ground and with little pieces of iron, little bottles, little artisanal compasses, tracing symbols and signs on these ceramic plates that became sorts of individual cosmogonies, small fragments of a cosmos where he could finally find himself again. A sort of offering to the gods for, as it were, saving his life. This series of plates, then, numbered 42 to 49, are not dishes for holding something, but surfaces where something is reflected: the dimension of the universe, and the consciousness of being a part of it.

During his illness, on those endless nights, Sottsass drew a great deal. He drew images, visions, abysses, darkness, but he also drew the dosages of his daily treatment. Here, at number 3, on this wall surrounding the ceramic of darkness, is a small drawing crowned by a little Italian flag, almost the hope of returning, that contains his medication, the list of the pills he took every day at the hospital: a long series of pills of cortisone, then pills for sleeping, for waking up, for going to the bathroom, for calming down, pills for everything.

He called it the “Palo Alto Totem Pole”, after the city where he was hospitalised. And if we think back to the totem poles we saw in the third room, those oversized ceramic columns, and then we look closely at these little pills, perhaps we can identify the source of inspiration for those big, voluminous objects. They don’t look too different from a sequence of these little pills transferred into three-dimensional space.

The experience of his illness and the trip to India marked Ettore Sottsass in a way that, if he were a fabric, I’d call indelible: it was profound, something that would never leave him. His takeaway was the idea that life cannot be wasted. We must be conscious of it at all times, in every moment, we cannot live without this awareness of where we are, what we’re doing, what the weather’s like, or the joy or fear we’re feeling. Every instant must be profoundly understood, accepted, and interpreted, and no object should be designed randomly, by chance. Each one must help us locate ourselves in the cosmos and in the universe.

These two large bookcase-like displays, in which we’ve placed a multitude of ceramics, serve precisely to bring together the objects that Sottsass began designing with the idea of making not vases, but rather symbols of our presence and our interference with the cosmos. He commented, “I want to design objects that help me figure out where I am, that pose questions about the fact that I’m here. I cannot make fortuitous vases”.

These two series – the one on the right called Yantra, that on the left named Tantra or Vasi di fumo, “Vases of Smoke” – originated in his readings of Eastern philosophies, and they contain the rhythmic devices of music, the physicality of gymnastic exercises, the olfactory world of incense – this series of attitudes and approaches that help Eastern philosophies provide meaning, locate people in the world, give people awareness of their being.

If we remember the ceramics that we saw on the large table at the centre of a previous room, these are profoundly different: something has clearly and ineluctably changed. And it’s Sottsass’s perception, his sensation, his awareness that being alive means being conscious of that fact, and participating in it in a profound way.

If Room 7 is the room of magic and the cosmos, Room 8 is the room of the mystery of technology. In 1957 Adriano Olivetti and Roberto Olivetti got in touch with Ettore Sottsass and put him in charge of designing the Ivrea-based company’s new electronics division. And what Ettore Sottsass must come to grips with here is the future.

Nobody really knew what electronics was. The Americans didn’t really know, even if they’d built a few computers, but those were military machines, secret worlds locked away in the army’s cavernous command centres. Olivetti represented one of the first great adventures in civil electronics, in public electronics. But what was electronics, exactly? Scientists themselves struggled to define it, and engineer Mario Tchou, whose home we encountered a few rooms back, well, he certainly knew something about it, but mostly it was a question of the flow of energy, it was about data input, bits, small amounts of memory moving in the form of electrical impulses, little more. So it’s no surprise that Tchou worked with a group of logicians, philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, plus a few few engineers, to build this machine that would govern this movement of energy flows, but which had no shape, no physical dimension.

So what Sottsass does is try to give this unknown quantity a design, a form. You can really see it in the photographs by Aldo Ballo, four photos grouped at number 8, in addition to the large image that welcomes us in, blown up to the size of an entire wall, also taken by Ballo: Sottsass imagined a computer that was a sort of magical box. The containers are sealed cabinets, closed off by iridescent, almost sparkling aluminium walls. The volumes are elevated from the ground, seemingly powered by wires, tubes and cables that descend from the sky; of course they’re actually suspended beams, nothing more. He tried to give form to this world of mystery; give form to the mystery, it was that simple.

But he did so with care: precisely because nobody really knew what electronics was and the machines were completely experimental, they constantly broke down, they were noisy, warm, they created a challenging environment. So he designed their volumes with low heights, so that the eyes of the technicians working on them could look over the tops and always see one another, no matter where they were in the room. So no one was ever alone. Designing for humans what was interested Sottsass, and just he tried to help you find your place in the universe, he also made an effort, if you worked on computers, to help you find your place while you worked and prevent you from being abandoned to the unknown.

This is the story these walls relate. The display that begins with number 1 contains designs of the first objects, ideas for consoles, ideas for cabinets, ideas for instrument panels, attempts to give these mysterious objects rhythm and meaning. Then, as we make our way upwards, numbers 5, 7, and 6 are grids, spatial grids in which the large cabinets of memory, transformers, printers, and magnetic disks would or could be arranged. It was all very big: the computer was certainly not something that sat on a table; back then, it occupied entire rooms.

Once again, Sottsass uses the language of art, in addition to that of science, to give shape to these structures that would proceed to colonise the offices of all large Italian companies. Naturally, people quickly familiarised themselves with these machines, and while Aldo Ballo continued to photograph the mystery that Sottsass designed, Ugo Mulas, on the opposite wall, in a group of images at number 9, shot a rather amusing and light-hearted Ettore Sottsass amidst the second version of the computer. The first version had been valve-based, while the second was already fully transistorised, snaking nonchalantly in and out of the large modules in the cabinets, almost with an air of feigned innocence and amusement. Sottsass was now clearly far more at ease with electronics than he had been at the start of the adventure.

The ninth room presents what we might call the less heroic work that Ettore Sottsass did for Olivetti, because it wasn’t all just big computers, large, extraordinary machines. Entrusted to him as well was the landscape of daily work, and yet again he approached this challenge by placing the person at the centre of his design work.

Let’s start what might seem like the most mundane, the tritest object in the room, the Tekne 3 typewriter. It’s here on the table at number 23. This was Olivetti’s first electric typewriter. The man first tasked with designing it was Nizzoli, the Ivrea company’s historic designer and the man responsible, among others, for the Lettera 22, a small masterpiece of Italian design. But in this period he had grown attached to a mode of designing that was all folds and corners, which Adriano Olivetti didn’t like, so they asked Sottsass to take a stab at it. Sottsass rolled up his sleeves, got to work, producing numerous sketches and drawings. We see some of them above on the wall, in purple, light blue, orange, red and blue – the various phases, the steps in his research, particularly the positioning of the keyboard. The result is an object of almost spartan simplicity. So much so that when it was presented to Adriano Olivetti, he looked at it, in silence and dismay, then said: “All right, Sottsass, I’ll go forward with it. I know this needs to be a new design, that there needs to be a change, but please, at least put the sun on it somewhere”. Adriano would die just a few weeks later, never seeing the finished design. Sottsass didn’t put the sun on the machine, but he did put it on the product’s poster, and we get a good look at it up here at number 19.

But it was actually no coincidence that this machine looked so ordinary, so commonplace. Sottsass imagined employees at Olivetti or other companies spending eight, even ten hours a day in front of this machine, six days a week – this was long before the five-day work week – and he felt that using strange, bizarre, imaginative or disturbing objects or details would be out of place; what mattered was offering something that was a source of calm. So he designed this machine very simply, but invested great effort in studying the optimal slope for the keyboard. He made sure to design each key with a sufficient distance from the others so a typist’s long fingernails, for example, didn’t hit the key itself or those around it, providing enough space to prevent long nails from getting broken.

He designed the machine as though it were one segment of a very long object, a forty or fifty-centimetre-long slice of a beam, a theoretically endless bar. Sottsass reasoned that this was not a machine for the home, it was an office machine, and that a large company’s accounting office would be made up not of two, but of twenty, thirty, forty desks, with people all working on the machine side by side. No strange ideas, then, but rather a continuous line, as continuous as possible, as though he were defining a landscape rather than an object. This is what mattered to Sottsass.

The idea of landscape was what stuck in his head as the solution to the problem of offices. So first he tried to create “landscape”, build structures in which to insert large electronic machines. The problem, however, was that electronics were quickly shrinking in size, and soon ended up becoming small objects for a desktop or tabletop, such that large structures to house large printers, teleprinters, and memory banks were no longer necessary. Everything got small.

But the idea of the system came to him once more when he was asked to design a collection of office. This is Sistema 45, and there’s an entire wall dedicated to it, there’s a platform that displays two chairs, a normal office chair with and without armrests, and a little yellow chair specifically for typists, a bit more ergonomic, better for the back, greater adjustability.

When he was asked to design the Serie 45, which came to include chairs but centred on tables, he imagined these large surfaces to be exceedingly simple: flat surfaces, light-coloured laminates, everything very simple. But the closer these furnishings come to the person, to the human hand or backside, the richer and more intense his designed become. The coat rack, number 8, certainly isn’t difficult to recognise: it’s made of ordinary metal tubes, yet on top the pegs look like the tiny branches of an almond tree about to blossom, just when the buds swell slightly at the tips of the branches, ready to explode into bloom. And the chairs – but the desk objects even more so – seem to be made with a shiny, glossy sugar icing. The idea was that, without exaggerating, without overdoing it, even the tiny landscape of the desk can become more interesting and exciting.

Now the ones they loaned us and that are on display here are black, but we can imagine them in midnight blue, olive green, pink, beige, aubergine: with slightly livelier colours, this beautiful, shiny resin would have an even greater effect.

Also shiny, brilliant and colourful is the Olivetti Valentine typewriter, possibly the most famous object Sottsass designed for Olivetti. From a commercial standpoint it was a total failure, but as a publicity campaign for Olivetti’s business culture it was an extraordinary success. Sottsass and Olivetti, in fact, were the first to realize that the machine was no longer just an object for work at the office, but had become an object for personal use, a source of entertainment.

Sottsass created the publicity campaign for the Valentine as well, imagining this machine being used by weekend poets writing poetry in the garden, young women carrying it with them on photo shoots, people at the market. In short, he inserts everywhere, except in the office, thus transforming it into a leisure object. Now all of us have phones in our pockets that are extremely technological objects, and we all know that technology also serves to entertain us, whether it’s taking photos or playing games or watching stupid videos. But in 1969, imagining that a machine could also be a toy, or more precisely still, a gadget, was truly visionary.

The surprise of the Valentine was actually a preview of the shift that Sottsass had already begun to embody: a more radical way of thinking, a different attitude, a more severe criticism of consumer society, of mass society, a society of approved information and conformist tastes.

When the Milanese magazine IN asked Sottsass, along with many other designers around Europe and beyond, what he thought of contemporary design, of the design of the city and the design of the world, he replied with a brief letter in which he said: “At this point I actually think that design is really nothing more than a staging of the psycho-physical diagrams of mood, of people’s states of mind. So I’d like to present and propose these designs to you with that spirit”.

At number 2, above the door, are reproductions of pages from the magazine with Sottsass’s reply to the provocative questions the director had posed. We see a series of highly unusual objects. There are small, portable sarcophagi, structures to label with the dates of the birth and death of people you like or that interest you: there are those of Marx and Lenin, but there could be those of Che Guevara or your grandfather, it doesn’t matter. They’re diagrams of life.

We discussed the god Shiva in relation to an earlier room, and it was to that deity that the collection’s symbolic object was dedicated. Some reproductions are displayed here on the wall, but if we look at the photographs in the magazine, we see how Sottsass interpreted them. He places this particularly emblematic vase on the table of a meeting of European prime ministers – we immediately recognize Harold Wilson – as if to liven up what was otherwise a highly bureaucratic situation, or in the midst of a trial at a people’s court during the Chinese Revolution. The object serves, yet again, to remind us that ideas should not be what makes live or die, but rather enthusiasm, energy and passion.

They’re are extremely symbolic objects. Ritual objects, fuelled by symbolism, and this one certainly is. The name Shiva serves to give it depth, a transcendent dimension, rather than being a mere reduction or enlargement of nature.

The radical shift has now taken on concrete form. Sottsass had begun a new phase, and Room 11 bears witness to it in full. The interesting thing, in Sottsass’s case, is that being radical didn’t mean carrying out a revolution, blowing up the world as it existed, but rather taking a step outside and imagining something different, suggesting something different. He did this in various ways.

Numbers 1 and 2 on the first wall represent an exhibition he staged in 1969 in Stockholm, an exhibition composed of entirely ritual spaces, of utterly symbolic objects, large ceramic towers, large ceramic assemblages serving no other purpose than to trigger various spatial relations and perceptions. The lowest photograph, a reproduction from the pages of Domus, represents an altar for individual ceremonies. Now we aren’t told what these ceremonies are. The important thing is that everyone has their own ceremonies. A ceremony can be refilling the ink in a fountain pen, winding your watch every night, kneeling down and praying, or simply being aware of undertaking a gesture full of meaning.

Sottsass designed spaces that suggest this to some extent, spaces that signify. It’s up to you to provide the meaning, but they’re all stages, like amusement parks of the soul. The photographs from Domus are also composed with pieces manufactured by Poltronova. He designed these pieces of furniture in striped laminate, the same ones he advised Camilli to produce. But the ones he most wanted Camilli to produce were a series of furnishings called Mobili grigi. They’re the large photographs above, numbers 8-12, pieces he presented at Eurodomus in Milan in 1970. They’re made of fibreglass, as though they were the frames of a bathtub or a boat, they’re grey, and they caused an absolute uproar. People visited the stand and said: “Who is this lunatic? What are you thinking? Where’s the house we’re supposed to live in? We’re not made for these sorts of things”. This was clearly furniture made to provoke a reaction, and that reaction was never long in coming.

The point is that what Sottsass cared about was that people question their way of living, question the spaces of their home, reflect on what they do and why they do it and how they do it. So he confronted them with furniture that wasn’t really furniture to purchase, but if you did, it wasn’t really meant to be used (though if you bought it at the time, it turned out to be a bargain); this was furniture that was meant to arouse some perception of self. The most successful object in the Mobili grigi collection was undoubtedly the large mirror Ultrafragola – pink, luminous, amused and amusing, making fun of you and making fun of itself – that stands out at the centre of the wall.

But these were the years when the counterculture and its radical attitudes emerged to the fullest. The wall dedicated to Pianeta Fresco – it’s easy to find, the title’s written in the centre – is a space that unveils a new visual landscape, a new type of graphics, but that’s actually a new language. It was a magazine that totalled about an issue and a half, little more; the head editor was Fernanda Pivano, the head of irresponsibility was American poet Allen Ginsberg, and the head of gardens was Ettore Sottsass. It certainly tapped into a part of the graphic art experience of the American counterculture, but also created a distinctly Italian, very European graphic style. It showcased designs by Sottsass’s friends, such as the groups Archizoom and Superstudio, it displayed imagery from Eastern philosophies, it showed another world. And this was characteristic of Sottsass’s efforts at the time: to not be limited by convention, custom, good taste and common sense, but rather to suggest how it was possible to live differently. What we see are sketches for the pages, pages torn from the magazine, suggestions and inspirations for existing elsewhere.

He did so as well with a series of ceramics that he said was inspired by his memories of his trip to India in 1961. Lined up on this long display, numbers 21 to 28, are six teapots and two fruit bowls. Now it is certainly possible to put some pears or peaches in the two bowls, but imagining someone actually making tea in any of the various teapots is far more unlikely. The fact is that, once again, they’re symbolic objects, ritual objects, objects meant to make you ask questions. Why is a teapot made like this? Maybe there’s no reason, no reason other than causing you to ask yourself a question. That may be it all it is.

The object functions not practically, but symbolically, it serves to make you think about where you are, what you’re doing, where you’re going. Above the display is a wall of drawings, of studies, of proposals: the work process that lay behind each object. After all, even the iconic object didn’t just appear in finished form; it came about as the laborious result of a journey, an experiment, an attempt, a multitude of improvements. All these drawings convey the glorious labour behind the design, which is never a finished gesture but always a path, an itinerary.

Many of the drawings in display 30 and above in the five colour lithographs were done by Tiger Tateishi, who worked in Sottsass’s studio for Olivetti but was also an amazing illustrator. So Sottsass used him, he used him often to illustrate these imaginary worlds of his that we see in these ceramics of the Indian Memory series, as well as on this large display – numbers 13 to 15 – dedicated to a project published in Casabella: Il pianeta come festival, “The Planet as Festival”. If you don’t get there with an exhibition, if you don’t get there with furniture, if you don’t get there with ceramics, then you’ll only get there through design. And these are highly imaginative designs for highly imaginative situations: viewpoints overlooking the sea, strange theatres of rock, great snakes that are roads crisscrossing through the Amazon, and so on. They’re worlds that don’t exist, radical worlds, a step outside of everyday reality.

If Mobili grigi, which happened to be Sottsass’s last project for Poltronova, had signalled a questioning of the place of habitation, of the home, the project that Ettore Sottsass created for the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, conceived by Argentine-American critic Emilio Ambasz and held at New York’s MoMA in 1972, marked the final divorce between two crucial sites of Italian design: the home and furniture. No longer did they coincide.

What Sottsass imagines is a theoretical space, let’s call it a virtual space, inhabited only by a series of identical, grey plastic modules, each inhabited by a different function. There’s the closet module, the armchair module, the sink module, the jukebox module, the shower module, all the modules you could ever want. There are around seventy modules in all, all of them independent, and all of them mounted on wheels, so the various pieces could be moved around. Space itself is no longer a given; it has to be conquered by how individual choose to organise the modules in the space at their disposal.

This, of course, was an exhibition, a theoretical space, but the concept was very clear, very precise. No more home, no more structure and rhythmic progression of the rooms – entranceway, kitchen, living room, bedroom. Now you determine what your space is, depending on where you place and position and how you group together the various modules the design makes available to you. It’s the end, you might say, of the serenity of domestic living. Life at home becomes a struggle between you and yourself to figure out what you want, and what you want to do about it.

And this is part of what is recounted in the film projected on one of the room’s walls, a quasi-cinematic representation directed by Massimo Magrì, then in his early twenties, with Sottsass’s collaboration. A film that would have made David Lynch quite envious.

The film narrates the anguish of a girl in an alienated and alienating world, as she wanders among these modules that suddenly become terrifying, a world she’s forced into, where she must live a normal life: her parents come visit, there are small children, there’s a stupid husband, all potential sources of torment. Then, in the final scene, her friends appear, the group and the community take control. At which point she and her young companions joyfully reorganise the furniture modules in what’s almost a sort of dance, demonstrating that a degree of happiness is attainable if you take control of your life.

We began this exhibition in a brightly coloured room, and we conclude it in a room of black and white. This is no coincidence. Sottsass’s divorce between the home and furnishings, as staged in the previous room, between design and function, between the purpose of the act and its presentation, was radicalised in his work between 1972 and 1976-77. It was if he bid farewell to all he had done before, and instead tried to distil a series of simple concepts, extremely simple things, simple but absolute ideas, with forms reduced to a minimum, to their essence: ropes, poles, little flags, branches, empty cardboard boxes. He used these objects to give rise to emblematic situations.

The photographs in Metafore stage a series of micro-topics or themes. A chair placed in a sort of desert, under the sun, is accompanied by the words, “Do you want to sit in the sun?” while that same chair, now in shadow, becomes, “Do you want to sit in the shade?” You’re asked extreme, absolute questions that are stripped of any superstructure. The problem of what a home should look like no longer exists; there are just minimal, basic gestures. Do you want a chair or a throne? Do you want a bed, which he imagines laid out and perfumed in a meadow, or do you want a stairway that leads to heaven? Do you want to salute a flag, do you want to gaze at the horizon? Do you want to do essential things? This was what was now in Sottsass’s head.

Gone were the results of the culture of style, of the academy: all of this was lost, it was abandoned, he let it go, and all that remained were these absolute gestures. This emptiness, which is a highly conceptual emptiness, certainly not an emptiness devoid of ideas: it’s an emptiness rich in words, in future, but poor in shape, in form. It’s the antechamber of what would be Ettore Sottsass’s second life, which burst into being in 1981 with the Memphis experience. But we don’t go that far. We’ve taken this journey in the company of the materials that Ettore Sottsass himself donated to the archive that Arturo Carlo Quintavalle established in Parma, the CSAC, or Communications Study Centre and Archive, and they refer to the period from roughly 1945 to 1975. 1981 is beyond.

But with Memphis he would undertake the same operation. Sottsass would ask himself a radical question: If I take the industrial contract away from design, if I take away that “industrial”, what’s left? What can a designer do? What is design? To such an extreme question he and Memphis would give a colourful, lively and explosive answer.

As you walk out at the end of the exhibition, passing back through the bookshop, you’ll walk underneath a chair named Tappeto volante, or “Flying Carpet”. We chose to place it here as a way of wishing visitors farewell, of saying goodbye, because this is exactly what Sottsass did at the end of these first three decades of his career: he felt the need to fly away, to travel towards a new world, a quasi-magical trip, a long flight full of colours, full of hope, full of future.

Some viewed the end of modernity as the end of optimism, almost a cause for sadness and depression. But not Sottsass. For him, the postmodern was open, free and future possibility, an attitude that the “Flying Carpet” evokes to perfection.