SOTTSASS GLASS WORKS
Marino Barovier, Bruno Bischofberger, and Milco Carboni [Editors]
Marino Barovier, Bruno Bischofberger, and Milco Carboni [Editors]: SOTTSASS GLASS WORKS. Dublin: Vitrum: Links for Publishing, 1998. First edition. Quarto. Black cloth titled in gilt. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Black endpapers. 156 pp. 130 color and 3 black and white illustrations. Rear jacket panel lightly nicked along fore edge. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dustjacket.
11.25 x 11.25 hardcover book with 156 pages with 130 full-color illustrations and 3 black and white illustrations. From Ronald T. Labaco, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, LACMA: “Working alongside craftsmen in the world-renowned workshops on the Venetian island of Murano, he became enthralled by the technical virtuosity and creativity of the glassblowers. He described the process as an arcane ritual: ‘As in the ballet of a magic rite, the men come and go, squashing and stretching the glass, inflating and cutting it . . . performing an enormous number of unwavering and miraculous gestures.’ For Sottsass, who characteristically introduces elements of the mystical into his work, glass provided the perfect vehicle for further artistic exploration.”
“In contrast to the simple, organic, modernist forms popularized by many other designers, Sottsass’s glassworks are more intricate and place greater value on color and form. His distinctive method of assembling various shapes to create a dynamic arrangement is most evident in this medium. In the mid-1980s, undaunted by traditional glassmaking conventions, Sottsass began to use glue and wire to attach elements, a technique that allowed him greater freedom of design.”
Contents
- Glass by Ettore Sottsass
- Glass for the 8th Triennale of Milan, 1947
- Glass for Vistosi, 1974
- Glass for Memphis (first series), 1982-83
- Glass for Memphis (second series), 1986
- ”15 Lamps for Yamagiwa” Series, 1990
- Rovine Series, 1992
- Glass for Bischofberger Gallery, 1994
- ”Big and Small Works” Series, 1995
- ”27 legni per un fiore artificiale cinese” Series, 1995
- Glass for Venini, 1997
- ”Esercizi e Capricci” Series, 1998
- Biographical Notes
- Museums and Galleries
- List of Glass Works
- List of Drawings for Glass
- Bibliography
Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917 - 2007) was an Italian architect and designer whose body of work included furniture, jewelry, glass, lighting and office machine design. He was educated at the Politecnico di Torino in Turin and graduated in 1939 with a degree in architecture. He served in the Italian military and spent much of World War II in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. After returning home in 1948, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio in Milan.
In 1956 Ettore Sottsass began working as a design consultant for Olivetti, designing office equipment, typewriters and furniture. Sottsass was hired by Adriano Olivetti, the founder, to work alongside his son, Roberto. There Sottsass made his name as a designer who, through colour, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realm of popular culture. Sottsass, Mario Tchou, and Roberto Olivetti won the prestigious 1960 Compasso d’Oro with the Elea 9003, the first Italian mainframe computer.
Throughout the 1960s, Sottsass traveled in the US and India and designed more products for Olivetti, culminating in the bright red plastic portable Valentine typewriter in 1970, which became a fashion accessory. Sotsass described the Valentine as "a brio among typewriters." Compared with the typical drab typewriters of the day, the Valentine was more of a design statement item than an office machine.
While continuing to design for Olivetti in the 1960s, Sottsass developed a range of objects which were expressions of his personal experiences traveling in the United States and India. These objects included large altar-like ceramic sculptures and his "Superboxes", radical sculptural gestures presented within a context of consumer product, as conceptual statement. Covered in bold and colorful, simulated custom laminates, they were precursors to Memphis, a movement which came more than a decade later. Around this time Sottsass said “I didn’t want to do any more consumerist products, because it was clear that the consumerist attitude was quite dangerous.”
The feeling that his creativity was being stifled by corporate work is documented in his 1973 essay “When I was a Very Small Boy.”As a result, his work from the late 60s to the 70s was defined by experimental collaborations with younger designers such as Superstudio and Archizoom, and association with the Radical movement, culminating in the foundation of Memphis at the turn of the decade.
In 1981, Sottsass and an international group of young architects and designers came together to form the Memphis Group. A night of drinking and listening to Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" gave the group its name. Memphis was launched with a collection of 40 pieces of furniture, ceramics, lighting, glass and textiles which featured fluorescent colors, slick surfaces, intentionally lop-sided shapes and squiggly laminate patterns
. The group's colorful, ironic pieces were hailed as one of the most characteristic examples of Post-modernism in design and the arts. Sottsass described Memphis in a 1986 Chicago Tribune article: “Memphis is like a very strong drug. You cannot take too much. I don't think anyone should put only Memphis around: It's like eating only cake.”
Whilst the Memphis movement in the eighties attracted enormous attention world wide for its energy and flamboyance, Ettore Sottsass began assembling a major design consultancy which he named Sottsass Associati. The studio was established in 1980 and gave the possibility to build architecture on a substantial scale as well as to design for large international industries.
Sottsass Associati, primarily an architectural practice, also designed elaborate stores and showrooms for Esprit, identities for Alessi, exhibitions, interiors, consumer electronics in Japan and furniture of all kinds. The studio was based on the cultural guidance of Ettore Sottsass and the work conducted by its many young associates, who often left to open their own studios. Sottsass Associati is presently based in London and Milan and continue to sustain the work, philosophy and culture of the studio.
As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, Esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova, Knoll International, Serafino Zani, Alessi and Brondi. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of Apple's first computer mouse, in Woodside, California. In the mid-1990s he designed the sculpture garden and entry gates of the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg Gallery at the campus of Cal Poly Pomona. He collaborated with well-known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun.
Sottsass had a vast body of work; furniture, jewellery, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings which inspired generations of architects and designers. In 2006 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first major museum survey exhibition of his work in the United States. A retrospective exhibition, Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress, was held at the Design Museum in London in 2007. In 2009, the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht presented a re-construction of a Sottsass' exhibition 'Miljö för en ny planet' (Landscape for a new planet), which took place in the National Museum in Stockholm in 1969.