Karen Camilleri HND 3D: Ettore Sottsass

Ettore Scottsass was an Austrian designer, but lived in Italy, from the late twentieth century. He was one of the founder of the Memphis Group, and also he designed iconic electronic products, as well as furniture and ornaments. He was one who always carried a camera with him, wherever he went, and photographed anything that interested him. He spent his whole career as a designer trying to change the past designs. He believed that everything should have a function. "When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism," he once said. After he graduated in architecture he was forced to join the army during World War 2. After the war he worked on housing projects with his father before moving to Milan in 1946. Over therehe spent the rest of his career working as and architect, industrial designer, painter and writing for Domus the design magazine. He travelled a lot for inspiration and visited places like India, Egypt and New York.

Below are pictures of the Acme House in Maui By Ettore Scrottsass. The owners- Adrian and Lesley were involved in the design and cooperated directly with the designer. Before knowing that is a beach house I instantly recognized that this is a house near the see because of its bright and vivid colours. It is a two story building with high roofs built around a big garden filled with beautiful green grass. The outside of the building has five colours- green, red, white and purple. These colours fit in really well together and makes the place very colourful. Since the outside already has a lot going on with the colours, the shape is quite simple and very geometric. It is made out of cubes only, except the roof of one part of the house the is triangle. The railings of the balcony are also very simple- cubic. Since this house is by the sea, I bet it is a summer house. In fact one side of the house has a lot of big glass windows for light to get in and brightens the indoors.

The design of the architecture reminded me of the Neo-plasticism paintings. This building could have been inspired from Pierre Clerk painting because they both have only straight lines and bold statement colours only. In the painting there are a lot of abstract cubic shapes and lines. The colours of the painting are the primary colours, black, white and green, which have brighter tones than the one of the building.

An iconic design of Ettore Sottsass is the Valentine typewriter released for the brand Olivetti on Valentine’s Day in 1969. It is a typewriter made from plastic with a fitted plastic case where you can slide it in easily. The colour for this machine was chosen red to fit the theme of Valentine, symbolises love and sex. This typewriter had a lot of feathers that included the carriage that dropped, tough it was the colour that made it memorable. Mr. Sottsass referred to his typewriter as the “anti-machine machine.” Forty years on it is still in demand among collectors, if not consumers.