Childhood. Turin. Coming Close to the Edge. The War. Post-War to America

Transcription

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2 Introduction 7 Childhood 19 Turin 39 Coming Close to the Edge 61 The War 85 Post-War to America 113

3 Olivetti to Apple 139 Radical Sottsass 165 Memphis 193 Sottsass Associati 209 Epilogue 233 Index 235

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5 Ettore Sottsass was a man who set out to leave as many clues as he could for his future biographers. His parents kept every letter that he sent to them during World War II. He got them back when he came home, and fled them away in neatly stacked bundles, like bricks of banknotes, held together by fraying rubber bands that have now grown brittle with age. Sottsass kept every negative of every photograph that he took during that war. He kept his passports and his military identity papers still creased and folded from the years that he carried them in his grey-green ofcer s tunic. He also kept every book in his father s architectural library. And he kept his father s high-school diploma, which is written in German refecting the fact that Sottsass senior was born in Sud Tirol, the German name for the Trentino and had Austro-Hungarian citizenship as one of the Empire s Italian-speaking minority. From the volume of what survives, it seems that he kept almost every drawing that he ever did from his childhood scribbles of a town square made in 1924, to the sketchbook that he used almost until the day he died in Sottsass was a brilliant draughtsman, he could draw perfect circles unaided with either hand, and he drew constantly. He lived through a time when paper was precious and used whatever scraps he could fnd. What appears on the back of the drawing is sometimes as revealing of what he was doing and where he was, as the material on the face side. He drew on the reverse of printers calendars, on the back of posters and on old layout sheets from Industrial Design magazine that he salvaged whilst in New York working for the designer George Nelson. He made notes on stationery that had originally been designed for a doctor in Turin. A few drawings were given away as gifts to friends but this did little to shrink the size of his collection. He donated a substantial number of drawings and a selection of gouache sketches, made when he was designing typewriters and adding machines for Olivetti, to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre holds other drawings from every stage of his career as well as physical examples of his work. What is not in Paris is kept in the University of Parma s archive, housed in a sixteenth-century former monastery in the meadows 8

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8 Ettore Sottsass was born in Innsbruck in the autumn of The town sits on the edge of the Brenner Pass the threshold between Teutonic and Latin Europe, and the division between two equally unsatisfactory national stereotypes of discipline and indulgence. At that time the pass was still a connection between the two halves of the Tyrol, and did not yet mark an international frontier. It was the link between Sottsass s mother Antonia Peintner from Hall, a medieval walled town near Innsbruck, in the German-speaking north, who would have called herself an Austrian, or perhaps even a German and Sottsass s father, also called Ettore Sottsass, who was from the ancient town of Cembra in the Trentino in the Italian-speaking south, and who was as proud to identify himself as an Italian as one day his son would be. The Tyrol was a sliver of Europe that over the centuries had passed through many hands. It had once been an independent duchy, then a bishopric. After that it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, apart from a brief period when it was taken over by Bavaria. Much like the polyglot Swiss Confederation immediately to the west, it had retained a sense of itself as a distinct and, despite its linguistic diversity, cohesive entity. The landscape, the mountain light, the weather and the elements of a shared architectural vernacular characterized by stone and timber farmhouses, and in the towns by more elaborate buildings whose facades were embellished with ornamental patterns worked into plaster all served to link north with south. Italian unifcation in the mid-nineteenth century had triggered a wave of agitation in the Italian speakers in the towns of the Trentino to secede from the Empire, and to join the new kingdom to the south. Politics remained intense in the region throughout the twentieth century. Benito Mussolini, while he was still a socialist journalist, worked briefy in the city of Trento to rally local support for the cause of Italian national unity although he soon judged it expedient to return to Italy to avoid the attention of the Austrian secret police. Later, in the 1960s, a group of radicals at the University of Trento established the frst Red Brigades terrorist cell. Italy s decision to fght alongside the Western Allies in World War I, rather than with the Central powers, was made in pursuit of 20

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10 The wedding of Ettore Sottsass senior and Antonia Peintner,

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