B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

If modern design had its beginnings in Britain at around the time of the Industrial Revolution, with William Morris and Christopher Dresser, and was codified in Germany by the Bauhaus, it was Italy that redefined it in the 1960s. Modernity in the hands of the Germans was determined to be sober and austere. The Italians gave it a more seductive flavour, with tactile finishes, shiny plastic and saturated colours. We knew that Peter Behrens’s electric kettle for AEG was important. So was the work that the Bauhaus team did. But it was bright-yellow adding machines in moulded plastic made by Olivetti and shiny lipstick-red plastic furniture made by Kartell that were the objects we actually wanted to own.

Italy was the last of the big European states to modernize itself and join the industrial economy, a process that was still taking place well into the 1950s. The transformation of the economy depended on a number of entrepreneurs, from Giovanni Agnelli to Adriano Olivetti, with dynastic, even nation-building, ambitions, and their work with an exceptional group of designers, including Giò Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Marco Zanuso, Joe Colombo, Ettore Sottsass and Mario Bellini. New factories and new technologies, coupled with what at first were low-wage costs, gave Italy the chance to find markets for its products, much in the way that China did half a century later. In 1972, New York’s Museum of Modern Art marked the distinctive contribution of this group of designers with one of the most ambitious exhibitions on design that it had ever attempted, Italy: the New Domestic Landscape. It was the moment that saw Italy make the shift from fringe to centre stage. It was making the weather, as Japan was to do in fashion in the 1980s, and as we can confidently expect that China will do in the very near future.

In retrospect, though perhaps it did not look like it at the time, the two key designers represented in the MoMA exhibition were Mario Bellini and Ettore Sottsass. They both trained as architects, they both worked with their own studio within the Olivetti organization, and as independent consultants. While Bellini’s work defined a certain glossy version of the Italian design language, Sottsass had a more complex position, working both within the industrial mainstream and outside it. Sottsass’s long life reflected and illuminated the making of modern Italy.

He was born in Innsbruck in 1917, on the wrong side of the battlefront between Italy and Austro-Hungary that was to redefine both countries in the First World War. His parents spoke German as readily as Italian. Educated, like his father, as an architect, Sottsass worked with him and then in his own studio in Turin, before setting up in Milan to begin designing domestic objects, lighting, glassware and furniture destined to be made in tiny numbers.

As an architecture student at Turin Polytechnic, he was a busy set designer for the student theatre company, an accomplished artist, and a member of the Fascist student youth movement. He kept his membership card, along with almost everything that had served to measure his life through every phase. It is housed in a filing cabinet in the apartment in the Via Pontaccio in Milan where he once lived, but which he turned into his archive while he was still alive.

During the Second World War, Sottsass was a lieutenant in one of the elite Alpini regiments that Mussolini sent to invade Montenegro as part of Italian Fascism’s inept attempt at imperialism. Sick leave kept him away from the barracks and stopped him from being dispatched to Albania to take part in the invasion of Greece along with the rest of the division. A few months later, he was even more fortunate to miss a troop train to the Soviet Union, to take part in a campaign from which very few Italians returned.

Sottsass began drawing when he was at primary school. He drew in exercise books and notepads, and on random scraps of paper. He drew on the back of recycled printer’s offcuts, and on old stationery. He carefully filed all of them away, along with his exercise books, his passports, his photographic negatives, and even his father’s school reports from his days as an architecture student in Vienna.

Sottsass’s drawings from the war years in Montenegro reveal his overwhelming fascination with colour and tone. He used watercolours to record in exquisite detail the textile patterns that he saw in handwoven carpets. There is an even more remarkable drawing that he executed during the war in black ink, in which he patiently records in carefully chosen words the score or more of colours that were used in a peasant woman’s shoulder bag. His diaries, written much later, record his experiences in that terrible war, with its futile bloodshed and its inevitable betrayals. Here were the Italians, invaders of the Adriatic coast opposite their own homes, many of whom found themselves siding with their own victims, against their former German allies. He describes the Serb and Montenegrin lovers he had, seemingly oblivious of what the consequences of being seen with an Italian officer in uniform would have been for them.

Half a century later, Sottsass was still preoccupied with colour in just as visceral a way as he had been as a young man in Montenegro during the war. James Irvine, an English designer who worked with him in his studio in Milan, remembers Sottsass describing a colour he wanted to use for a project as being like the colour of a dress that his first wife, Nanda Pivano, had worn for a party years before. Sottsass asked Irvine to go to her apartment to ask if she still had it, and if so to borrow it so they would have the reference they needed.

Interned in Yugoslavia by the Nazis when Italy capitulated, and faced with the choice of prison or collaboration, Sottsass joined the Monterosa division of the newly formed army of Mussolini’s rump state, the Salò Republic. It was a decision that was to overshadow the early years of his post-war career. Long afterwards, he recalled being denounced as a fascist in the lobby of the Milan Triennale building, by another designer who had had the luxury of a less traumatic experience of war.

In the post-war period of Italian reconstruction, Sottsass found himself working on social housing projects, initially in partnership with his father, but also designing small domestic objects on his own. He moved from Turin to Milan, a city that was rapidly establishing itself as the Italian capital of design. Pivano was a literary translator, who gave her husband a perspective beyond the world of design, and Italy. She worked with Hemingway, and with the American beat poets, and much later translated Bret Easton Ellis. Sottsass photographed himself and Pivano in Cortina, in Venice and in Cuba. He went to New York with her, and for a brief period worked in the office of the leading American industrial designer George Nelson, giving Sottsass a transatlantic cachet that helped him secure the first of his commissions from Olivetti in 1959. Astonishingly, it was to give form to a mainframe computer, the first that Italy had ever built. With no previous experience of any kind in the world of data processing, Sottsass moved from working on decorative fruit baskets to a giant computer, which he sketched for the first time on the back of one of the layout sheets for Industrial Design magazine, the US publication he had worked on for Nelson. But it was perhaps no more of a leap than the shift taken by the Norwegian artist Jean Heiberg, who moved from learning to paint in Henri Matisse’s studio to shaping the definitive form of the twentieth-century telephone for Siemens in Bakelite.

The Elea 9003 was the first, and almost the last, Italian-made mainframe computer. Mario Tchou led a team of engineers who devised an all-transistor machine for Olivetti that was intended to compete with the best American, British and French manufacturers. Sottsass’s role was to give the Italian machine a distinctive identity. The name with which they christened the computer said a lot about how Olivetti saw itself. Elea was a Greek city state on the Italian mainland with its own school of pre-Socratic philosophy.

Sottsass made something of a breakthrough by conceiving of a computer as a collection of individually manageable parts, to be slotted together as needed to build the required capacity. He treated the computer as if it were a piece of portable furniture. It had no screen, and a capacity of less than one million alphanumeric characters, not enough to accommodate a complete Tolstoy novel. The Elea sprouted cables at high level rather than demanding a raised floor to conceal them as its competitors did. The arrangement made it easier to install, and it suggested that the Elea was an object rather than an integral part of the building in which it was housed.

‘What should a computer look like?’ Sottsass asked himself when he started work on the project. ‘Not like a washing machine,’ he wrote on a sheet of paper that is now preserved in the University of Parma’s archives

The Elea was the size of a living room, but it was designed so that its operators, who tended it in air-conditioned sterility, were not made to feel as if they had been swallowed up by a machine. And to this sensitivity for the individual, Sottsass added a feeling for the emotional qualities of design. The keyboard for the Elea 9003 seemed to communicate that you were in touch with something important and momentous. This was the portal to the future, and Sottsass made it look the part by searching his subconscious memory for the visual clues suggested by sacred objects through the ages.

Equally significant as a landmark for Italian design was the Valentine, a portable typewriter designed by Sottsass with Perry King for Olivetti, an object that used a bright red plastic body, contrasted with two vivid splashes of orange on the twin ribbon spools, to make what had previously been understood as a mundane piece of business equipment into a personal possession. Everything about the design was asking us to understand Olivetti’s products in a different way. Sottsass made the breakthrough of giving a product category associated with office routine a domestic, playful quality - through its moulded-plastic body and its vivid red colour scheme. The Valentine represented one end of Sottsass’s approach. For more conventional office machines, such as the Tekne electric typewriter, he preferred a less expressive aesthetic vocabulary. ‘When you have several hundred machines in an office, you don’t want them all drawing attention to themselves as individual objects. They should work together in an architectural way,’ he said.

For two decades, when it was still a family-run business, Sottsass remained closely associated with Olivetti and his studio-designed typewriters, office furniture, adding machines and accessories. They served to define the idea of modern office equipment for a while. But Olivetti was never able to fully adjust to the digital world; and this reluctance to adapt to change eventually destroyed the company. It had grown on the strength of the ability of its engineers to make mechanisms that drove adding machines, calculators and typewriters, skills that were rapidly becoming redundant.

Sottsass always maintained a presence beyond Olivetti, in his own studio, exploring more personal ideas of what design might be. When, in the 1980s, the Memphis movement exploded the conventional idea of what passed for contemporary design, Sottsass, who was its guiding genius, had already qualified for his pension. But far from giving up, Sottsass was embarking on what turned out to be the most successful and creative period in a career that had already been exceptional.

A quarter of a century later, in 2007, Sottsass, a grave figure with the sad eyes of a bloodhound and a carefully tied pigtail, celebrated his ninetieth birthday, still active, still working with a studio in Milan, and still gently acerbic.

‘Greatness’ is the most overused word when it comes to describing success. But with Sottsass, it is nothing less than his due. It was Sottsass, and a few others, notably Achille Castiglioni, who showed how contemporary design could go beyond the utilitarian, or the cynically manipulative, and become a genuine form of cultural expression. But Sottsass was also able to make the most from contemporary production. It was this combination of a taste for poetry with the ability to work in the industrial mainstream that set Sottsass apart. He was ready to engage with the pragmatic everyday problems of working life in an office. But he was also absorbed by the expressive qualities of objects.

To move from the world of the Olivetti factory to the deliberately transgressive assault on conventional good taste of the Memphis movement that Sottsass founded might seem like a huge turnaround. But in fact there is a strong sense of consistency throughout Sottsass’s output. The spirit of his ceramics and glassware from the 1950s was still evident in the work coming out of the studio almost until the time of his death. And it is in this quality, as much as in Sottsass’s ability to operate within an industrial world but not to be consumed by it, that his greatness lies. Sottsass saw too much of life to be deluded by the shiny optimism of a glossy surface. And yet he knew how to make something beautiful out of the sadness that comes of experience.

From the 1960s onward, Sottsass had a continuing interest in the counter-culture. He was in California at the time of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, and in India when the West began to look for alternatives to its own conventional materialistic values. He worked with Alessandro Mendini as art director for Domus magazine, steering it away from the complacency of Italian good taste, and together they crystallized this sensibility in design in the Studio Alchimia collections.

Later, Alchimia was eclipsed by Sottsass’s own creation of the Memphis movement, with which he brought together a group of young Italians, principally Michele De Lucchi and Aldo Cibic, and an international group of postmodernists, including Michael Graves, Shiro Kuramata and Hans Hollein, in a move that made up in impact what it lacked in aesthetic consistency. Memphis looked like a fusion of high art with popular culture, a deliberate attack on conventional ideas of good taste. The name Memphis was variously explained by Sottsass as a reference to a Bob Dylan track, to Elvis, and to Ancient Egypt. Irony and a gently subversive approach to design was combined with a highly decorative approach to colour and pattern. The vivid colours and patterned laminates came partly from Sottsass’s own imagination, and partly from his rediscovery of the innocence and optimism of the early days of Italian modernism in the 1950s, which by the 1980s was only to be found lingering in faded coffee bars in the suburbs of Milan. Even for those who were unmoved by its aesthetic vocabulary, Memphis had a conviction and excitement that could not be ignored.

Memphis was a joyous, un-bossy manifesto for design as an emotional expression. It was also an attempt to bite the hand that fed it by gently satirizing the manufacturing system. Design is, in the end, about making us want to buy more things, and Sottsass, at heart always deeply subversive, was highly ambivalent about that. He built a series of extraordinary houses, including one for his dealer, Ernest Mourmans, in Belgium. I remember a weekend there when I was editing Domus. Sottsass wanted to get it published. ‘Why don’t you ask Helmut Newton to take the photographs?’ Newton was beyond the magazine’s budget, but he came anyway, and the two men spent the time gently sparring for dominance in a house built around an aviary for Mourman’s rare birds.

We live in a world which values the useless ahead of the useful, which celebrates art, untainted by the least hint of utility, above the ingenuity of design that is burdened by function, and creates a cultural hierarchy to match. It was perhaps the greatest achievement of Sottsass’s long and remarkable career that he made this distinction irrelevant. He was not interested in making objects that sell because they look pretty or seductive or precious. What he wanted to do was to find ways of giving everyday objects some sort of meaning. He wanted to show that they are not just banal clutter but are shaped by creative intelligence and an understanding both of how they are used and how they are made.

Throughout his life, Sottsass managed to pursue two parallel careers. At the same time that he was working on the mass-produced, trying to give some sense of dignity to the mundane, he was also creating ceramics and glass, and limited-edition furniture pieces that had the emotional intensity of art.

The design world has become fixated by youth, and by the merciless pursuit of the next big thing. But age had no effect on Sottsass. With the English designer Chris Redfern, he was still running an active office engaged in creative work right up until the end of his life in December 2007.

Sottsass, like his father, also called Ettore, saw himself first and foremost as an architect. Almost all Italian designers trained as architects in Sottsass’s day, and too many of them want to go back to designing buildings, even though they are manifestly better off sticking to the scale of cutlery and chairs. Sottsass was an exception in that he was gifted as an architect, even though he remained outside the mainstream. He knew everybody, and worked everywhere. He built an apartment in the unlikely setting of the Albany in London for Jean Pigozzi, the celebrity photographer, collector and entrepreneur. At the other end of the scale he designed a golf resort for the People’s Liberation Army in China.

Sottsass’s generation cast a long shadow over Italy. Many of them lived and worked into their eighties. They left little room for the generation that followed them. Milan remained a global centre for design, but it was a city that depended more and more on designers from outside Italy.