Word: sottsass
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...threaded fabrics, and some are decorated with colored light bulbs. Los Angeles Designer Peter Shire's ironing-board-shaped table, Brazil, is finished in sea green, pink and yellow lacquer. It could serve as an animated cartoon prop, the perfect background for Tom and Jerry. Memphis Founder Ettore Sottsass Jr. has gone further. His Park Lane'coffee table is strictly from Oz: a giant black marble aspirin resting on delicate emerald green feet...
...Sottsass, 66, such contradictions are nothing new. Following his Turin university days, the Austrian-born designer witnessed the transition of Italian architecture from fascist monument to utilitarian modern. He became an acclaimed leader of the spare and sensuous new style in the 1960s, creating innovative and clean-lined office furniture and machinery for Olivetti, a task he still performs. But influenced by the Pop painting of Roy Lichtenstein, rock music and Indian mysticism, he surprised colleagues with Olivetti's plastic Valentine portable typewriter. He later did a table and stools called Mickey Mouse, and designed a disco outside Beirut...
...Sottsass created Memphis in late 1980, he says, to "get rid of institutional rhetoric." The replacement? What he calls "suburban slang." The name appropriately comes from rock: Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again happened to be playing the night Sottsass crystalized the project with half a dozen young followers. His oddly hued, plastic-laminate-covered Carlton room divider, whose bookshelves extend at eccentric angles, is intentionally haphazard-looking. Since books tend to settle on an incline anyway, reasoned Sottsass, why force them to stand at attention? With a core committee in Milan, Sottsass...
...Memphis quest, claims Sottsass, "implies an optimism that the body is always winning. The puritanical, Catholic approach of 'less is more' is wrong because we know that all Catholics are sinners." Yet Sottsass's domestic décor is far more spartan than hedonistic. His Milan apartment and office are simply furnished, with plain tables and black plastic chairs. Says he: "I have to be free of any outside information to concentrate. I would like to live in a monastery...
...whose chairs, toys, films, buildings and exhibits, produced with his wife and partner, Ray Kaiser Eames, made good design American. There is the Dane Arne Jacobsen, whose sleek furniture and tableware for a while convinced the world that all good design must be Danish. There are two Italians (Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Marco Zanuso) and a Finn (Tapio Wirkkala), reflecting the international, eclectic diversity of the decorative arts in our time...