Sotto il sasso sta l'anguilla (under the rock is an eel) is an expression from the Dolomites, the native region of Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007). It suggests that hidden wonder awaits discovery in common things—the essence of Sottsass's designs. His body of work paved the way for creative practices that span diverse materials and blur distinctions between art and design. Sottsass worked at every scale, from airports and houses to ceramics and jewelry, from mass-market products to unique gallery editions. He pioneered conceptual design with objects that challenge conventions and propose alternative, even idealized, ways of living—ideas so radical they rarely progressed beyond the provocation of the prototype.

Despite his impact on designers, Sottsass remains an obscure figure among broad audiences. He is noted for founding the design collective Memphis (1981–86), but even this brief period is misunderstood as a quintessentially 1980s fashion-driven fad. This exhibition contextualizes his 60-year career by presenting his most profound works alongside objects that inspired him, as well as those by contemporary designers he continues to influence.

According to his writings, specific people and movements guided Sottsass's thinking, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Donald Judd, Bauhaus and Pop art. In his extensive travels, he encountered mandalas and yantras, stupas and linga, ritual implements and ethnographic artifacts; he identified in them symbolic and archetypal forms, materials, colors, and patterns that serve social, spiritual, and sensual needs. He gravitated toward the human aspects that many felt modernism lacked in its dogmatic exaltation of machined mass products intended for anonymous consumers.

Sottsass reformed cerebral modernism with a humanist heart and soul. His work delineates a way out of a wasteful society through a heightened understanding of the spiritual and symbolic values of useful things.

After receiving his architecture degree in 1939 in Turin and serving in World War II, Sottsass started his practice in Milan in 1947. His earliest designs include Marshall Plan–funded buildings and working-class housing, on which he collaborated with his father, Ettore Sottsass Sr., an architect trained in the Viennese tradition of the modernist Otto Wagner. Viennese design, especially the work of Wagner's pupils Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, of the Wiener Werkstätte, influenced Sottsass with its elegant proportions and spare geometric forms. Sottsass and the Viennese alike were masters of modernism's defining tenets: their objects do not rely on excessive ornament; rather, beauty is found in the expert handling of the material itself, showcasing how its inherent qualities determine form and structure.

Until 1965, Sottsass pursued a parallel career as a painter, realizing, "A painter does not think in color. He's inside it. I am more capable of spreading colors in space than on a piece of paper." Along with Max Huber and Bruno Munari, he was among the artists Max Bill exhibited in "Abstract and Concrete Art," which launched the Concrete Art movement in 1947. Bill's version of geometric abstraction was intended to appeal concretely and universally, an ethos derived from his training at the Bauhaus. This legacy intrigued Sottsass throughout his career, in reaction against its mechanical sameness, but with reverence for its social impact. He shared the Bauhaus's aesthetic preference for geometric volumes and bold colors, whose shades he compared to nuances of meaning.

In 1956 Sottsass made his first trip to the United States, where the country's industrialized society offered a stark contrast with war-torn Italy. For a few months, Sottsass joined the New York office of the industrial designer George Nelson. New York at the height of its postwar consumer-driven expansion had a profound impact in shaping Sottsass's ambivalence toward mass production. While such manufacturing allowed for miraculous economies of scale that democratically provided the latest innovations to the wider public, it also seemed to indicate a culture of rabid consumption, sameness, and even alienation. Regarding his vision of design, Sottsass wrote that he would create "tools to slow down the consumption of existence . . . to curb loneliness and despair."

Sottsass's work at this time impressed Adriano Olivetti, who recruited him in 1957 as a design consultant for Olivetti, the global machine and electronics corporation. Sottsass maintained an independent practice and served as a consultant until 1980. His first project was a landmark in design history, the first all-transistor mainframe computer, Elea 9003. Over the years, he designed a number of machines, typewriters, office furniture systems, and advertisements that contributed to Olivetti's overall corporate identity. In all his designs, but referring specifically to the Elea 9003, Sottsass said he tried "to depict the machine as a cultural statement, not as a neutral more-or-less functional mechanism, but as a character whose presence affected the lives of those with whom it came into contact."

In 1957 Sergio Cammilli started his "radical factory," Poltronova, with Sottsass as artistic director. Over the following decades, the visionary furniture company produced designs that engaged in sociopolitical critique and protested the status quo's bourgeois lifestyle. Sottsass became a mentor to a new generation of designers, the protagonists of the Radical Design movement. Their objects proposed alternative ways of living, suggesting and accommodating new social behaviors arising with the youthquake phenomenon of the 1960s.

Conceived first as miniature scale models of cabinets, which were photographed to appear full size, the Superbox series marks a significant departure from Sottsass's previous designs. Acknowledging the growing trend toward mobile lifestyles with fewer possessions, Sottsass proposed a single cabinet to contain all the necessities of modern life. The totemic minimalist box stands like a menhir or ritualistic altar in the middle of a room, a vertical gesture toward the cosmos. Inspired by Pop art, Parisian fashion, and his recent voyages to India, Sottsass wrapped his Superboxes in graphic plastic laminates, which were meant to facilitate a new relationship between user, object, and environment.

For the Museum of Modern Art's 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curator Emilio Ambasz commissioned several Italian designers to construct experimental living environments. Their forms responded to changing lifestyles with more informal social relationships, evolving notions of privacy and territoriality, and new materials and production technologies. Each designer produced a physical prototype as well as an explanatory film.

Sottsass proposed his Environment as a system of movable modular cabinets, each of which contains one of a variety of domestic functions. Designed as a conceptual provocation in the 1970s spirit of challenging social norms, his Environment calls for liberation from traditional architectural structures and the social values associated with home-ownership. He presents an open-source shared domestic utility catering to a more nomadic or communal existence, a radical precursor to today's sharing economy.

Sottsass's work with ceramics started in 1956, when Irving Richards, an entrepreneur who promoted modern art, commissioned a line of pieces and introduced him to Bitossi, one of several ceramics manufacturers he would partner with over the rest of his career. By studying the progression of Sottsass's output of more than 1,000 ceramic objects and thousands more sketches, it is possible in this one medium to narrate the vicissitudes of his personal history, design philosophy, and cultural preoccupations. One of the most critical periods in his life, his first visit to India in 1961 and a near-death illness in 1962, inspired two ceramic series that are among his most personal projects, the Tenebres and the Offerings to Shiva. Examples of these works are on view here, as is his Yantra line inspired by Indian mandalas.

Sottsass designed his first collection of glass, produced by Vistosi, rather late in his career, in 1974. He had attempted a few minor pieces since 1947, but the medium did not engage him initially the way ceramics did. Glass is the only medium for which he repeatedly commented on the separation of designing from making, as if the material only reveals its properties and potential to those who work with it directly. His designs for glass then are formal exercises, experiments in testing his understanding of its limits. The objects exist somewhere between function and nonfunction, vessel and sculpture.

After the Vistosi collection, Sottsass's interest in glass amplified with each consecutive collection, the next appearing in 1982 as part of his work for Memphis. In the Memphis series, he combines archetypal forms—classical shapes including the amphora, baluster, and chalice—to explore structure, color, transparency, and ornament. In his 2004–5 Kachinas series, Sottsass conjures the supernatural powers of Zuni and Hopi katsina dolls by abstracting their basic forms into glass.

Despite working on a variety of scales and in an array of mediums, Sottsass always called himself an architect. This vocation, described as an ancient human archetype, informed his fundamental approach to making and living. For the architect, drawing is the basis for articulating concept and design, and drawing was similarly at the core of Sottsass's practice. However, it was not until he designed the Wolf residence in Ridgeway, Colorado, in 1987 that he felt he had fully matured as an architect. His architecture synthesizes years of research and experimentation with the basic elements of design to create a built environment that has the power to improve everyday life.

If color is a language, then Sottsass is most articulate as a colorist. In his sketches, he not only uses the requisite color, he describes it in exacting detail: Portofino olive-brown, lucid silver, zinc black, Turkish zinc. Every tone has a corresponding association, a memory, a story. For Sottsass, colors have semiotic functions, as do the patterns he developed for textiles and the plastic laminates used on the Superboxes and, later on, for his Memphis work. When juxtaposed with stone, wood, metal, or ceramic, the plastic laminates he designed for the company Abet Laminati offer a range of spatial possibilities, trompe l'oeil conceits, and humorous plays on high- and low-cost materials. The patterns derive from numerous sources: composition notebook covers, terrazzo floors, metal fencing, netting, and even an abstraction of the vibrational effects of ancient Indian temples, as well as Minimalism and Pop art.

Sottsass's emphasis on surface, color, and pattern is not merely superficial. He believed that the skin is the site of sensual and emotional stimulation. For this reason, the skin of the object holds special importance in his mission to create works with personality that act on us as much as we act on them. The skin paved the way for Memphis.

In her 1987 book Jewelry by Architects, the Memphis member Barbara Radice, Sottsass's partner, wrote: "The architects have designed their jewelry as a formal exercise, as an extension of their work with architecture. They have conceived them as purely decorative objects or as talismans charged with symbolic meaning. . . . They have an affinity with, if not a real resemblance to, other much more ancient examples of jewelry, such as Sumerian or Minoan, or primitive ornaments from Africa or Melanesia. They draw on the most distant past, a past that is mysterious because it is forgotten. They do not repeat styles but seek out ritual cadences, concealed fragilities, tenuous figurative suggestions, or powerful and solemn forms."

Sottsass's radical experimentation through the 1960s and 1970s informed the founding of the design collective Memphis in 1981. The small international group of like-minded designers called themselves Memphis in reference to the ancient capital of Egypt and the modern city in Tennessee, with a nod to Bob Dylan's song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." They produced furnishings that brashly rejected design conventions in their reinterpretation of the basic elements of function, form, material, surface, and color. The first collection hit Milan's Design Week in 1981 with revolutionary force. Over the next few months, Memphis became an international sensation, and it continues to symbolize the essence of 1980s aesthetics. Karl Lagerfeld famously furnished his Paris apartment entirely in Memphis. David Bowie was an avid collector.

While the group aspired to achieve the right balance of high quality and mass quantity, the pieces were marketed and priced beyond the reach of average consumers and thus became icons of 1980s excess. Critics still dismiss Memphis as childish, a reactionary dead end to modernism. But others argue that Memphis liberated design from dogma. It created optimistic alternative designs that reimagined society by reimagining the forms that shape it. Memphis further redefined the status of the designer as an artist, placing primary importance on his creativity and agency to determine the final product—a value that today contributes to the blurring of the art and design markets and the rise of "collectible design."

In the final two decades of his career, Sottsass concentrated on architecture as well as collaborations with galleries, especially that of Ernest Mourmans, who produced many of Sottsass's last pieces of furniture. Generally underappreciated and obscure, the late work in this gallery offers a dialogue with four important 20th-century artists and designers: Piet Mondrian, Jean Michel Frank, Gio Ponti, and Shiro Kuramata. Sottsass wrote about the importance of Mondrian, Ponti, and Kuramata to his own approach. While we do not know what Sottsass thought of Frank, the French designer focuses our attention on veneers, surface, and structure in counterpoint to Sottsass's approach. The masters' objects serve as formal comparisons to Sottsass's, elucidating basic design and aesthetic principles, such as material experimentation, formal innovation, and structural daring. These juxtapositions also demonstrate how Sottsass diverged from these masters, further revealing him as a true design radical.