Ettore Sottsass

Ettore Sottsass, a graduate architect, became the artistic director of furniture manufacturer Poltronova in 1957 and, one year later, the design consultant for Olivetti, for whom he designed Valentine typewriter (1969), among others. Sottsass started creating his first ceramic works during the late 1950s, following a trip to the Middle East. As the forerunner of the “radical architecture” movement, which renounced functionalism and modern rationalism, Sottsass was actively engaged in the theoretical debates of the 1960s and 1970s on design and architecture. After establishing the groups Global Tools (1973), a true counter-school of architecture, and Alchymia (1976), which endeavoured to apply the “radical” principles of the preceding years to design, Sottsass founded the group Memphis in 1981, which rapidly became synonymous with “New Design”. The same year, Sottsass created his Sottsass Associati agency, with which he carried out numerous architectural and design projects.

The works on display at Mudam are from two different projects. The first is a series of vases Ettore Sottsass created with the close collaboration of Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres. Each vase is called by the name of an heroine of mythology or literature. The second project on display is a series of four pillars built with Corian, a material invented by Dupont de Nemours.

The two projects are governed by material- and coulour effects. "To me, colours are like words. Words have vocabulary, and colours do too. With the colours, you can create an object or paint an environment in the style of a novel."