Ettore Sottsass Jr, Environment section from “The New Domestic Landscape”, New York, USA, 1972

Date:March 16, 2016

Tags: containers, furniture, minimal place, movable, transformable

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Ettore Sottsass Jr, Environment section from the exhibition “The New Domestic Landscape”, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, USA, 1972. (view on google maps)

Sottsass was part of the Antidesign movement, created by Joe Colombo in the second part of the 60s, which aimed to protest against the consumer society by designing objects that cannot be used in real life. The exhibition in MOMA in 1972 represented a new way of living, a new way of using objects.

Sottsass is using a sort of containers as furniture of a living place, using the idea of self-subsistence within a minimal place. Each part of a classic house is contained in one of those containers, representing some closets, a table, a fridge, a library, etc. The containers can be moved and interchanged easily thanks to wheels. His idea was the possibility of eliminating rigid structures in a living place in order to create his own new place and transport his staff wherever and whenever he wanted. For him, it was a way of manifesting himself by his furniture.

A second idea transported by his work is linked with the discovery of space at the same period and the lack of energy. In fact, architects and designers tried to think about a new way of living, based on utopic proposals to overcome the problems. They imagined a world where everything could be reused in different ways and simplified from the real life. That is why Ettore Sottsass designed a provocative room with the minimum necessary to live and easily transported.