“I am an architect – Ettore Sottsass”: The world before Memphis

by Nicola Desiderio on May 4, 2026

Dedicating a single definition to Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) is a futile exercise. Architect, designer, photographer, graphic artist, a nomadic and restless intellectual, he traversed twentieth‑century Italy with a clarity of vision that remains striking today. Palazzo Buontalenti in Pistoia dedicates to him the major retrospective Io sono un architetto – Ettore Sottsass, curated by Enrico Morteo and promoted by Fondazione Pistoia Musei and Fondazione Caript. Inaugurated on 7 March and open to the public until 26 July 2026, the exhibition brings together more than 1,400 works — drawings, projects, photographs, archival materials, and design objects — from the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) of the University of Parma, alongside loans from major institutions and private collections. An extensive corpus that reconstructs thirty years of research, from 1945 to 1975, a period in which Sottsass’s relationship with Tuscany became particularly fertile and generative.

The installation unfolds through thirteen rooms arranged around the building’s evocative central courtyard, defining a rhythmic and coherent exhibition path. Each space is devoted to a specific design theme, turning the visit into a progressive immersion into the author’s universe. Accompanying the experience is a refined guide booklet distributed at the entrance: an essential yet intelligent tool capable of cataloguing each piece with precision. This instrument not only facilitates the identification of the works room by room, but becomes a fundamental compass for deepening and decoding the complexity of the materials on display.

The exhibition route precisely conveys Sottsass’s gradual emancipation from the dogmas of rationalism. In the postwar years, he embarked on a personal research in which painting, color and light converged to overcome the austere rigidity of modernist design (Room 1). The second room explores the dialogue between Sottsass and the Bauhaus legacy. Here, the analytical investigation of solids and voids uses the language of abstract figures to map the very structure of space. After the war, Sottsass translated this theory into manual practice: by manipulating humble materials through cuts and interweavings, he generated elementary objects that concealed sophisticated geometries.

Already in his early graphic experiments, one senses the seed of a radical vision: architecture is no longer understood as a mere functional system, but as an emotional and sensory experience. This theoretical evolution finds its full expression in his visceral relationship with matter. Through ceramics —reinvented thanks to his historic collaboration with the Bitossi manufactory — Sottsass achieved a revolutionary synthesis: color becomes volume, and the object sheds its decorative function to become a symbolic construction. The experience in Room 3 is truly striking. Here, the series of plates radiates a conceptual power that transcends the dimension of utilitarian objects: they are no longer simple dishes, but fragments of a narrative in which form becomes ritual and matter becomes pure intellectual expression.

In the fourth section, the focus shifts to the domestic dimension, which for Sottsass transcends functional neutrality to become a true emotional theatre. Since his university years — when he imagined Cubist interiors illuminated by Matisse’s light — the domestic space is conceived as an “inhabited scene”: a living volume crossed by sounds, memories and desires. Walls lose their rigidity and transform into vibrant surfaces of color and decoration, giving shape to a dynamic domestic landscape where furniture and geometries interact with human experience. For Sottsass, to inhabit means to immerse oneself in an ecosystem of material and visual vibrations. This vision matures in the following room, where his rejection of rationalist rigidity becomes evident. Far from orthogonal purity, Sottsass entrusts light and shadow with the task of shaping space. Already in the early 1950s he experimented with the fluidity of reinforced concrete through thin vaults and curved surfaces — an approach also found in his social housing projects in Sardinia. Here, architecture does not define mere spaces but generates places designed to foster encounter and human relations.

Beyond the courtyard, the sixth room documents the revolution initiated in 1956 with Poltronova. Here Sottsass transforms furniture into an ironic and visionary manifesto — from the Superboxes to his pre-postmodern works — aimed at dismantling the bourgeois conformism of Italian design. Despite being new to the field, Sottsass designed with the lessons of George Nelson in New York in mind. His American experience revealed the contradictions of mass society: the allure of progress contrasted with the alienation of consumption. Sottsass responded through irony, using the object as a tool of rupture to free domestic life from everyday banality and restore to it an authentic, vital dimension. From America to India: 1962 (Room 7) marks a radical turning point. During this journey, Sottsass abandoned any remaining modernist optimism to seek in objects a cosmic and spiritual meaning. Iconic series such as the Ceramiche delle tenebre, Offerta a Shiva and Ceramiche Yantra were born: artifacts that transcend functional use to deeply question humanity’s place in the world.

Room 8 marks society’s transition into the technological era. The space, entirely clad in a mirrored film, creates a deliberately disorienting environment: a kind of hall of mirrors in which visitors lose their bearings and become part of the installation. On the walls, photographs depict humans alongside machines — the automatic calculator — at a moment in history when human beings still appear as the deus ex machina of their own technological evolution. The rest of the room displays abstract drawings and geometric patterns inspired by components of the Olivetti Elea 9003, transforming the aesthetics of Italy’s first computer into an autonomous visual language suspended between art, design and technical imagination.

Another fundamental chapter is the collaboration with Olivetti, begun in 1957 (Room 9). Sottsass approached industrial design as a territory to be deciphered: metallic surfaces, essential geometries and unexpected colors transformed electronic machines and office objects into technological landscapes that never abandoned their human dimension. It is in this context that the first Italian electronic calculator was born, encased in a shimmering aluminum shell — the legendary Valentine — while the Synthesis line redefined the identity of the contemporary office. The exhibition then moves into a more intimate space (Room 10), dedicated to the provocations of the late 1960s: here stands the celebrated Florero Shiva, the phallic-shaped vase that embodies the spirit of rupture and irreverent irony of his mature poetics.

In the eleventh room, the exhibition focuses on Sottsass’s radical thinking before Memphis — the Italian design and architecture collective he founded and which was active from 1981 to 1987. Here, his decisive rejection of the idea of design as neutral, functional, or governed by formal rules takes shape. For Sottsass, an object is never just an object: it is a fragment of life, an emotional catalyst, a sign capable of giving form to desires, fears, and rituals. With Memphis, this vision becomes even more extreme, turning furniture and lamps into symbolic presences charged with color, irony, and dissonance. It is a form of design that does not aim to “solve problems” but to open possibilities, disrupt perceptual habits, and restore a poetic and unpredictable dimension to everyday life. To represent this season, the curators have chosen the Ultrafragola mirror-lamp designed for Poltronova. The following room is set within the context of the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA 1972, where Sottsass presented a project that fully embodies the radical shift in Italian design. His proposal — a mobile cabinet, a kind of wheeled shell capable of transforming into a kitchen, a toilet, a jukebox, or a social space — dismantles the traditional notion of dwelling, dissolving the boundaries between functions and environments. This “mutant” vision asserts that the home is not a set of codified rooms, but a flexible system ready to adapt to the emotional, social, and cultural needs of its inhabitants.

The final room is a sharp break. In the early 1970s, Sottsass distanced himself from the world he had built up to that point. The roughly forty images of the Metafore series mark a zero degree of design: after chromatic exuberance comes black and white, a shift of high conceptual density resolved through a drastically reduced formal vocabulary. Defining a new, hypothetical field of action is the unmediated collision between the absoluteness of nature and a few essential, humble signs of life that Sottsass arranges as clues to a future yet to be imagined. The experience condenses into a theoretical statement that closes one cycle and opens another. As a point of departure, Metafore coincides with the donation of his archive to the CSAC in Parma: a gesture that marks the end of a season and the beginning of a new design horizon.

The retrospective at Palazzo Buontalenti thus reveals an author who transcends the simple label of architect — despite the exhibition’s title — and who sees design as a tool for questioning the world. From early material experiments to the encounter with technology, from ritual ceramics to radical visions of dwelling, each room presents a Sottsass capable of changing form without losing intensity. The journey ends before the Metafore, yet it does not conclude: that essential black and white is not an epilogue but the opening of a new horizon. Before Memphis, before the bright colors and irreverent forms, there is a Sottsass who lays the foundations of a cultural revolution. This exhibition tells its origin, reminding us that design, for him, was always an act of life, a gesture of freedom, a way to imagine what does not yet exist.

“I am an architect – Ettore Sottsass”: The world before Memphis

Archives

Recent Posts