Ettore Sottsass, Jnr: more than just a funny name

Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures.  More than 30 years ago, Frederic Raphael wrote a teasing piece in the TLS mentioning an Italian designer with a funny name, as if to disparage design as a whole. I boldly wrote in defence and, surprisingly, my letter was published. That designer was Ettore Sottsass, Jnr (1917–2007).

The ‘Jnr’ was not mere affectation, although there was a bit of that. His identically named father had also been a distinguished architect. (The curious name is Romansch, meaning ‘under the stone’). Sottsass, born in what used to be Austria before it was Trentino-Alto-Adige, became a prominent figure in Italy’s postwar ricostruzione, its industrial revolution which gave us the epochal Vespa and the Fiat Cinque-cento. First as an architect of dignified social housing, then as a designer for Olivetti, the manufacturer of typewriters and electronics which, in that attractive Italian way, was both an employer with lofty social principles and an inspired patron of the arts.

It was Sottsass who determined the appearance of the first Italian mainframe computer, Olivetti’s Elea 9003 of 1959. Soon after, he was saved from a mortal health crisis when Olivetti paid for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center in San Francisco. Recuperating, he got to know the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookshop crowd, including Kerouac’s fellow-traveller, Neal Cassady.  Thus it is pleasing to note that the designer of Italy’s first computer was connected to the Beats and the Bay Area drug scene.  That ‘Jnr’ appendage revealed a lifelong romance with the hipper versions of Americana.

By the time we met in Milan in the late 1970s, Sottsass was surrounded by an adoring tribe of international acolyte-trainees in ‘Sottsass Associati’.