Ettore Sottsass: The Man Who Made Ugly Beautiful on Purpose
In December 1980, a group of designers gathered at Ettore Sottsass's apartment in Milan to look at sketches. Someone put on a record. Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" played while they flipped through drawings of furniture that used pastel laminates, geometric squiggles, mismatched colors, and shapes borrowed from comic books and ancient Egyptian jewelry and 1950s American diners. They needed a name. They named themselves after the song.
Memphis debuted its first collection in September 1981 at the Arc '74 showroom in Milan. The design world, which had spent twenty years telling itself that good design meant clean lines and honest materials and form following function, responded with something between outrage and bewilderment. The Carlton room divider was a six-foot bookshelf shaped like a cartoon human figure, finished in plastic laminate in five different colors. The Tahiti lamp had a base shaped like a tropical bird. The Beverly cabinet looked like a pinball machine.
None of it followed the rules. That was the point.
The Long Road to Memphis
Sottsass was born in 1917 in Innsbruck, Austria, the son of an Italian architect. He studied architecture in Turin, graduating in 1939, and then the war arrived. He served in the Italian military, was captured, and spent part of the war as a prisoner in Montenegro. He came back to Milan in 1946 to start a practice.
The first twenty years were conventional by the standards of Italian architecture. He did apartments, exhibitions, industrial work. The turn came in 1958, when he began consulting for Olivetti, the typewriter company that had decided its machines should be beautiful.
The Elea 9003 (1959) was Italy's first mainframe computer. Sottsass designed its housing: a series of pale gray units on legs, clean and modern and nothing like the institutional gray boxes that filled every other computer room in the world. The Elea won the Compasso d'Oro, Italy's highest design award. Sottsass was suddenly the person to call if you wanted technology to look like it belonged to humans.
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Explore the Design Archive →The Valentine and the Counterculture
The Valentine typewriter (1969) is probably the most famous thing he ever made. Bright red, with a matching red case, designed to work anywhere except an office, the slogan literally said "for use in any house but the office." It looked aggressive and cheerful and slightly ridiculous, which was deliberate. Olivetti sold it as a cultural object as much as a machine. Students bought it. Writers bought it. It appeared in films. It is still one of the most striking objects of the twentieth century.
But then came India.
In 1961, Sottsass was diagnosed with a severe kidney infection that nearly killed him. His wife at the time, Nanda Pivano, a writer and translator, brought him back to health. He traveled to India to recover, and the trip changed something fundamental in how he understood objects. He had spent fifteen years making things look good. In India he saw objects that were sacred, that held meaning beyond function, that connected people to something larger than efficiency. He started thinking about design differently: not as problem-solving but as ritual, as meaning-making, as culture.
The thinking accumulated through the 1960s and 1970s in work for Olivetti and in a series of "Totem" ceramic sculptures, tall column-like objects that referenced Indian temple architecture and had no function at all. Dieter Rams was saying "less but better" in Germany. Sottsass was quietly building a counter-argument in clay.
Memphis and What Came After
Memphis was the argument fully formed. The aesthetic was deliberate chaos: plastic laminates printed with squiggles and dots and geometric patterns, primary colors next to pastels, forms that quoted ancient cultures and low culture simultaneously. The critical reception was mixed to hostile. The public was fascinated.
Within a year, Memphis had influenced fashion, graphic design, architecture, and advertising on three continents. Karl Lagerfeld bought the entire first collection. The style filtered into everything from album covers to MTV graphics. "Memphis" became shorthand for a certain kind of deliberate visual loudness, an insistence that objects could have personality, could make jokes, could contradict themselves.
Sottsass closed Memphis in 1988, after seven collections, because he felt it was becoming a style rather than a question. He continued with Sottsass Associati, designing stores for Esprit, objects for Alessi, architecture across Europe. He died in Milan on December 31, 2007, at ninety.
The Carlton room divider is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Valentine typewriter is in MoMA. The Elea 9003 is in the Olivetti archive. The squiggles are everywhere.