Born in Austria in 1917 to an Italian father and an Austrian mother. His family moved to Italy in 1929. Encouraged by his architect father, he began studying architecture at Turin’s Politecnico, graduating in 1939.
After the trauma of the war, he was taken prisoner and locked up in a camp in Sarajevo. Ettore Sottsass settled in Milan and took part in the reconstruction and social housing programmes. But he soon came up against the material constraints and political orientations of the time, which were preoccupied with efficiency, and he later confided that to be an architect, you had to be calm, mature and sensitive to life.
Instead of realising his dream of architecture, he preferred to design architectural objects. In 1947, he founded his own design agency in Milan, a city he would never leave. Thanks to his curiosity, this indefatigable and gifted jack-of-all-trades turned his hand to painting, graphic design, furniture, jewellery and ceramics, all of which fed off each other in a process of “cross-fertilisation”.
Ettore Sottsass began working with ceramics in 1955. His vases and objects dream of simple forms. With the help of Aldo Londi, the artistic director of the Bitossi workshops in Montelupo, he produced a small series of ceramic vases and objects. The client wanted to renew forms and objects in the world of design, and Sottsass created objects that “appeal to the perception that everyone has, or can have, of their own adventure”.
In 1956, Ettore Sottsass went to New York where he worked for a few months in George Nelson’s design agency. This was the turning point. He was introduced to industrial design. He discovered Pop Art and the American consumer society, which had a huge influence on him. He also began a 10-year collaboration with Poltronova, during which Sottsass established a coherent formal language to which he would remain faithful throughout his career.
In 1958, his meeting with Adriano Olivetti was providential and marked the beginning of a peaceful and lasting relationship with the Italian company, for which he became a designer-consultant (until 1980). During this period, two journeys were decisive, laying the foundations for the rest of his work. In 1961, he discovered India, where the colours, lifestyles and relationship with death changed his vision of the world. In 1962, Sottsass went to Palo Alto in the United States for treatment. It was while he was in hospital, at night, that he conceived the Ceramiche delle Tenebre or Ceramics of Darkness series (1963), followed by Ceramics of Light (1964).
“I had thought of these ceramics last year when I was ill and was almost saying goodbye forever to my family, my acquaintances and all my friends, even though I didn’t attach much importance to it, being an optimist by nature”.
These simultaneous cultural shocks led him to reconsider the social and political aspects of the production of objects and design, which placed him in a natural complicity with the Italian avant-garde, a veritable melting pot of demands.
In the 1960s, Sottsass opposed American consumerism and joined the Antidesign group, before contributing briefly in 1979 to the development of the Alchimia studio with its founder Alessandro Mendini in Milan.
In 1981, at the age of 64, he founded the Memphis group of young international designers based in Milan and the company Sottsass Associati. The aim of these movements was to question the involvement of designers and architects in consumer society, and to encourage the creation of “useful beauty”.
Ettore Sottsass was an artist who worked in many fields of art, leaving a considerable imprint on them, profoundly changing them thanks to his curiosity. He died on 31 December 2007 in Milan.
