Word: sottsass
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Industrial design, in the Italian manner, has long meant sophisticated elegance. Products like Ettore Sottsass Jr.'s Olivetti Valentine typewriter, Marco Zanuso's Aurora fountain pen or Mario Bellini's Chiara lamp are displayed in modern art museums to exemplify beauty...
That philosophy would probably not be disputed by Ettore Sottsass Jr., 57, one of Italy's most versatile industrial designers. Best known for his revolutionary design of Olivetti's Valentine typewriter in 1969, the rumpled, droop-mustachioed Sottsass still devotes most of his time to that company's office systems and machinery but also creates ceramics and glassware for other European clients...
...struggle of designers to free themselves from their traditional limbo, somewhere between architecture and interior decoration. More and more, design strives to be active: its tutelary gods are no longer Chippendale or the Bauhaus, but Buckminster Fuller, Marcuse and Ronald Laing. The thrust of designers like Ettore Sottsass, Gae Aulenti, Marco Zanuso and the "Archizoom" group is not to decorate the psychic space around us but to extend and question it. This means a critical approach to social patterns, which starts with the language of shape...
...funky gigantism is parodied in Gaetano Pesce's "Moloch" floor lamp: a tensor desk light enlarged to a height of 9 ft. And, just as many a Victorian bronze looked better with a lampshade than as sculpture, the use of neon tubing becomes laconically appropriate in Ettore Sottsass's "Asteroid" lamp. What goes on with such designers is not a passive borrowing of fine-art motifs but, as Museum Curator Emilio Ambasz puts it, an "ironic manipulation of the sociocultural meanings attached to existing forms...
...cushion system (see color page), it is apparent that the functionalist concerns of the Bauhaus are receding. Some emphasis has shifted to furniture as dream or fetish or ikon. Thus Gae Aulenti designs a variable bookcase/shelf/sleeping-platform unit that, glittering in vermilion fiber glass, resembles a Mayan sacrificial altar; while Sottsass's red ceramic vase has the archaic look of a ziggurat...