As a follow-up to my last piece on the Brechtian architecture of Edmond and Corrigan, I have updated my review in Domus with an excerpt from Sottsass’s writings, examples of his travel photography, and other images not originally included.
From time to time, I will continue to post on design-related topics. Look out for a catalog essay I wrote for ceramicist Alex Reed’s 2019 exhibition at Marta Gallery and an interesting discussion about art versus design practice with curator Christopher Mount, New York artist Justin Beal, and artists/musicians, the Muistardeuax Collective.
My name is Ettore Sottsass
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn. Bertolt Brecht, Scene 6 - Life of Galileo (1939)
In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a retrospective exhibition to celebrate 65 years of work by the prolific Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007.) A founder of the Memphis group, the Milanese collective of designers, Sottsass bridged several disciplinary boundaries and produced numerous media, buildings, and objects (furniture, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and industrial design). Sottsass, a designer-artist who valued human relations above the illusion of artfully manufactured objects, conceptualized the show.
I think that architects sometimes don’t design houses but ideas that can be had of how to design a house and then they design the ideas about how to design the ideas to be used to design a house…
All this to say that there are times when architects — as specialists, as a special caste — collect ideas about architecture, a gigantic quantity of ideas and information about architecture and then this information is organized, published and communicated, interpreted, supported and then cataloged until eventually all this information and all these catalogs become tout court the actual existence of architecture itself; they become the place where architecture is confronted, the point from which measurements are taken; they become the manner itself, the manner of being understood, the cultural standard, trial and error etc.
At times also, all this information and all these catalogs become a certificate of caste, a tribal sign; sometimes even a national sign etc. At times I think that at the end of this journey, one may also find one has lost the best of the problem, I think that in the end one can lose that special feeling, that special hope, and most of all that reassuring aggressiveness, that determination without logic, that inebriating state, that can sometimes be experienced in designing and in building a house. It occurs to me that one may happen not to recapture, for example, that special state of innocence and curiosity, ignorance and conceit that one sometimes felt, as a child or later, when hiding under the stairs, entering an empty house, discovering a cave, building a hut in a tree, disappearing into a concrete pipe
Then, of course, there are rituals of every description. There are rituals to protect monetary status and there are rituals to assert the status of social power, there are rituals to show off, let us say intellectual-cultural status and there are rituals to show the status of a “life-style…”
There are popular rituals too, rituals of people who know little or nothing about powerful social binders and who rely on signs, for what they are, for what they can give, who protect themselves with elementary rituals, with simple pújás that matter for what they are and for what they can give and nothing else.
Perhaps the history of architecture may even no longer be that of Sir Banister Fletcher, into its eighteenth edition, or histories of that sort, I mean histories with catalogs of monuments, with catalogs of styles and descriptions of the works of art, when they are not histories done with the hierarchy of building heights or with lists of technological inventions or something.
Perhaps the history of architecture might some day or other also let its immense and immaculate bosom be kissed by some different child — I won’t say dissolute or irreverent, but only different….
Those who designed the houses that I have photographed on my travels seem to me a bit like people that sail the open seas of architecture...
Travel Notes Ettore Sottsass in: Terrazzo n°1, 1988.
As Bertolt Brecht reminds us, sometimes you have to choose between being human and having good taste.
Brecht, who spent some time (quite unhappily) working in Hollywood, once described Los Angeles as a local version of Hell. It is hard to imagine the super-serious German dramatist enjoying LA. But it is easy to understand why he felt so strongly about the city. To this day, Los Angeles is inevitably a wonderful big pastiche of a town, but it sometimes works too hard to simulate good taste, which can be annoying. Whether or not that makes LA a more or less perfect symbol of human fallibility or hellish is probably debatable.
With that said, I would like to think that Brecht would have been at least slightly pleased to find that Los Angeles sponsored the first significant exhibition and assessment of Ettore Sottsass’s career within a significant North American museum. And, were he to visit the show via a time travel machine, I could imagine Brecht wandering around the galleries and approving of the many ways that Sottsass consistently rejected good taste or what Flaubert termed “…the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”
Let’s suppose that there is a Brechtian quality evident in Sottsass’s efforts. In that case, it lies in the designer’s insightful recognition and acknowledgment of the connection between human beings and material culture (see Hans Höger, “Ettore Sottsass. Existential design” Domus 880 April 2005). What stands out for me is Sottsass’s persistent, intensely collaborative, and didactic spirit. True, the artifacts retain and sustain his aura, but their success depended on his ongoing collaborations with artisans, galleries, labs, manufacturers, colleagues, and clients. These were relationships that he carefully seeded and tended from his base in Milan. Therefore, every artifact or collection of objects in the exhibition is linked to a well-nurtured and incredibly personal network. The trick would be to connect the artifacts to his collaborations and those partnerships to the patrons that produced them to pursue this insight further.
Sottsass’s travel photography, taken in India and North Yemen, tells another compelling story. As a body of research, it creates a fascinating “loop” between his training as an architect and, as he writes, his exposure to the highly-skilled, inventive but untutored builders who “…rely on signs, for what they are, for what they can give…” It is useful to contemplate Sottsass’s later architectural work in light of this travel photography. Not so much because it suggests that he thoughtlessly appropriated what he saw but because he was confident enough about his influences to document and honor them. He seemed to have remained open, well into his career, to the power of popular rituals and the ingenious qualities of the anonymous designer and communal construction.
As a follow-up to a more extensive exhibition staged at the MART Rovereto in the Italian province of Trento, the objects displayed at LACMA captured Sotsass’s shifting belief systems and, in some ways, the highly personal and more obscure nature of his later projects. If his early designs were expansive, not reductive, flexible, and not dogmatic, then the lessons of the late work are more masked or opaque because he offered no “teachable lessons” and provided little tutelage at the close of his life.
Brecht did not often depict the human (or human nature) within the individual but was instead motivated to symbolize human relations above the illusion of an artfully manufactured interior life. Like Brecht, Sottsass succeeded in making the familiar seem somehow strange, permitting the subject or “user” to be engaged enough by each designed object to render it both unfamiliar and unique. This “defamiliarisation effect,” what Brecht termed Verfremdungseffekt, requires us to critically consider the created thing in its context rather than mindlessly consume design as a part of capitalism’s commodity system.
The LACMA exhibition demonstrated that Sottsass insisted to the end on being a humanist. His entire oeuvre stands in firm resistance to the 20th century’s hegemonic cultural, economic, and political imperatives. It wordlessly rejects mass production for the idiosyncratic and the conversational art-craft-object. By refusing the demands and realities of the market and rejecting overtly puritanical dispositions towards utility, pragmatism, and matter-of-factness, Sottsass moves us as his audience away from “rituals [that] assert the status of social power.” He delivers us to the “elementary rituals…that matter for what they are and for what they can give and nothing else.”
Ettore Sottsass’s unique point of view must finally be regarded as opposed to any number of the dominant -isms that were mandated by the past century’s received orthodoxies – none the least of which is functionalism or what is more aphoristically called “design task orientation,” e.g., the value of work before pleasure. Sottsass, above all, exhorts us to engage his artistic and ethical positions. In valuing human relationships over good taste, Sottsass, like Brecht, tell us that art must not only entertain: above all, it must teach.