Ettore Sottsass: The Poetry of Things
In Conversation with Deyan Sudjic
08.08.23

Book Club is an opportunity for design discourse – news, views, and reviews from the world of publishing in conversation with our favourite design authors, commentators, and provocateurs.

Deyan Sudjic OBE is a writer, curator, and editor specialising in the fields of design and architecture, and Director Emeritus at London’s Design Museum. He was the founding editor of Blueprint magazine, a former editor of Domus, and the director of the 2002 Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2023 he launched Anima magazine dedicated to “design intelligence”. Deyan is also the author of numerous books including The Language of Things, Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture, and Boris Iofan: Stalin’s Architect.

NHO Founder and Director, Neil Hugh Kenna recently spoke with Deyan to discuss another title in his portfolio, Ettore Sottsass: The Poetry of Things. This is their conversation.

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NHK: Deyan, welcome. Thank you for making the time to speak today. Before we dive into your book – Ettore Sottsass: The Poetry of Things – I’d love to take a moment to reflect on your incredible career. From journalist, to curator, author, and Director Emeritus at London’s Design Museum, you’ve carved a distinct path. Dare I ask, was this by design? What initially sparked your interest in architecture and design?

DS: I wouldn’t call it incredible. It’s certainly been a lot of fun. It’s been a license to be curious, to ask nosey questions and to meet interesting people. As a schoolboy I was determined to become an architect, as a way to address all those troublesome issues adolescents face about working out what and who they want to be. Architecture would be the choice of subject to study, and the career to follow. It didn’t quite work out that way. I realised that I wasn’t going to be a very good architect when I spent a year in a studio and found that I hadn’t much clue about how to make an architectural idea into a physical building.

But looking back, I realise that there was something below the surface about design and architecture that intrigued me. My parents came to Britain from Yugoslavia – a country that no longer exists. I learned their language at home, and English from the BBC, and I can remember the day that I realised, as a snotty child, that they didn’t speak English like anybody else. I can remember spending summers back in Yugoslavia, and noticing that banknotes there came with images of heroic workers and peasants, power stations, and coal mines, rather than portraits of the Queen, and worthy Brits kitted out in wigs and unnecessary amounts of facial hair.

I was realising that national identity is designed rather than innate, and I wanted to know all I could about how architecture and design are used to do that.

NHK: Given the breadth of your professional achievements, when you look back, was there a moment that was particularly powerful in shaping your trajectory? Did you ever consider taking a different route that may have led you elsewhere?

DS: My daughter Olivia Sudjic is a novelist, who writes about some of the same issues that fascinate me: the impact on our lives of technology, and identity, through a fictional lens. It makes me realise that my fleeting ambitions to be that kind of writer were never going to be realised. I describe what I see, and never knowingly write fiction, but so often it has been literary writers who have been able to explore the world in the most powerful ways. When I want to understand the nature of the birth of the modern city, I read Dickens and Zola, Pamuk, or Ballard.

NHK: Fortunately for us, your career has led you here today to discuss this wonderful book, and the man himself, Ettore Sottsass. Sottsass is best known as one of the founders of the Memphis Group, and for this reason I don’t want to dwell here too long. However, you were living in Milan during this time as the editor of Domus, a magazine founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. What do you recall of that period? What was life like?

DS: It was an enormous privilege, like being given the keys to a finely tuned, beautifully crafted vintage racing car. I was at Domus just before the digital explosion transformed the ecology of publishing. There were budgets to send photographers to Beijing to explore the construction of the Herzog and de Meuron’s Olympic stadium, to Tokyo to look at the Prada flagship, and to Shenzhen to document the transformation of modern China. There was enough advertising to fund 400-page issues, and the time to plan and structure each issue as it took shape over the course of a month.  It was a magazine on a scale generous enough to be able devote 20 pages to a single building, enough to offer a sequence of images that could adequately describe its spatial and material qualities. Editing a magazine was a process that began with a features list, became a flat plan, and then, as the stories were laid out, turned into a dieline monochrome dummy. Eventually it all came together as a freshly printed magazine, thick with the heady scent of ink when it arrived back from the printer. It was an irresistible and unique process.

My previous experience of working for a family-owned architectural magazine had been in London where the Architectural Review was still based in a pair of aristocratic 18th century houses, haunted by the ghosts of Nikolaus Pevsner and Reyner Banham. There was a recreation of a traditional English pub in the basement, with a stuffed lion and a gilded mirror etched with the signatures of Gropius and Le Corbusier. It was an organisation in which editors did not use typewriters but wrote long hand for a cadre of well-bred secretaries to type, ready for the printer.

Domus in sharp contrast to this living fossil, had abandoned its old home on the via Monte dei Pieta,  just off the via Manzoni, at the start of the 1980s.  My desk designed by Gio Ponti himself, was a commanding maple wood affair with ingenious glass topped compartments to accommodate a telephone. It had little brass socks to protect its splayed legs, and had clearly been shipped out at the time of the move to Rozzano, where it looked more than a little out of place.

I began to understand that Italy is a formal country. It took months to persuade people to use my first name. I came face to face with the complexities of publishing a magazine in two languages. At first, I tried to make the Italian text, running twice as long as the English, sound as clearcut as the English, until I realised how inappropriately blunt this would seem.

Pierre Restany, the veteran art critic, told me about the time at the Venice Biennale in 1968 that he had to hide in Harry’s Bar to avoid being pushed in the canal by a group of leftist students for some perceived ideological transgression.

NHK: Some analyses of Sottsass’ career suggest his association with the Memphis Group was actually limiting, overshadowing his many achievements that came before and after. In fact, in the book you note that being defined as a designer rather than an architect “disturbed and irritated him”. Given this, what would you like people to know about Ettore Sottsass? Why was the time right to publish this book? (N.B. The Poetry of Things was first published by Phaidon in 2015).

DS: Memphis was an important and fascinating aspect of Sottsass’s work, but it was only one episode in an extraordinarily fruitful career. He was an accomplished painter, though he gave up trying to be an artist, a lifelong photographer, who documented his world with a camera half a century before the smart phone allowed all of us to try to do the same, and he was a brilliant writer. He produced magazines, built houses and airports, designed main frame computers as well as studio glass. To focus only on Memphis would be like talking about late Picasso and forgetting all about cubism.

NHK: Like all of us, Sottsass was shaped by his life’s experience. From his childhood, to the experience of war, extensive travels, and certainly meeting many people of influence – yet it’s his meeting with Roberto Olivetti that you describe as the “pivotal event of his career”. What was so significant about this moment?

DS: It’s how Sottsass describes it in his unreliable but very colourful memoirs. Roberto Olivetti was the son of Adriano, one of the most remarkable businessmen who ever lived. Roberto and Adriano were determined to transform Olivetti from a company that made typewriters and mechanical calculators into a modern computer manufacturer. They took a chance on appointing Sottsass to work on the physical form of their first computer.

The Olivettis saw it as a civic responsibility to invest in the facilities, to look after their employees, and to play a wider role in society. Some companies sponsor football teams. Olivetti supported Kinetic art exhibitions and restored Venetian landmarks.

Olivetti appointed his son-in-law, Giorgio Soavi, a writer and a close friend of Alberto Giacometti, as the company’s corporate design director. He and Renzo Zorzi, who edited Primo Levi’s first book, lead the selection of architects, artists, and designers to work for Olivetti. Zorzi, who retired in 1986, was succeeded by Paolo Viti. Louis Kahn built Olivetti’s factory in Pennsylvania. James Stirling designed its training centre in Britain. Carlo Scarpa, Gae Aulenti, and Ernesto Rogers did its showrooms. Olivetti employed Richard Meier to design its US headquarters in 1971 but cancelled the project. Kenzo Tange’s training centre in Yokohama did go ahead, while Milton Glaser and Herbert Bayer designed its posters.

NHK: You describe Sottsass as, “A man whose life reflected the course of modern Italian history and who made us think about the material world around us differently. Without him, the world would have been a different and a poorer place.” Considering the state of design – and of the world – where architects and designers grapple with the challenge and opportunity of climate change, new technologies, and most recently artificial intelligence, what do you think Sottsass would have to say? What might he be working on if he were alive today?

DS: Sottsass was always looking for ways of giving the things around us qualities that can last, amid constant change, and to comfort us in the face of the challenges that face us.

NHK: A philosophy that’s never been more relevant. Thank you for your time, Deyan. You’ve been incredibly generous with your answers. Keep well.

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Ettore Sottsass: The Poetry of Things by Deyan Sudjic is available to purchase via Phaidon Press and Bookshop by Uro.