THE bulbous gold-leaf knobs on a yellow wood chest demand to be touched. A blue bookcase, tilted on its side, provokes giggles. (Books tend to tilt, so why shouldn't it?) Cutlery, ineffably simple but incredibly balanced, seduces the hand that holds it
For the Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, shape, texture, volume and color are languages as direct as the spoken word. They talk to the senses rather than the intellect and deliver the message that using a beautiful object can make you feel more alive than using one that is less well-designed.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday May 04, 2006 Home Edition Home Part F Page 6 Features Desk 0 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Architect's name -- In a March 9 article on Ettore Sottsass in the Home section, architect Lorcan O'Herlihy's last name was spelled O'Herlily.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday May 04, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Architect's name: In a March 9 Home section article on Ettore Sottsass, architect Lorcan O'Herlihy's last name was misspelled as O'Herlily.
The 88-year-old, ponytailed Sottsass, here for his first major U.S. museum show, has spent 65 years making furniture, glass, ceramics, jewelry, even houses, into what he calls "catalysts of perception," objects designed to enhance the life of users simply by being used.
If this sounds abstract, Sottsass explains it much more simply: "To drink water from a waxed paper cup on the highway and to drink it from a crystal goblet are different gestures. In the first case, you almost forget that you exist as you drink. In the second ... you realize that you have in your hands an instrument that makes you reflect upon how you are living at that moment," he said in an interview in Domus magazine in 2004.
Although revered in the inner circles of American design and architecture, the public has had little exposure to Sottsass' name or his art. That will change on Sunday when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unveils the first museum survey of his designs in the United States.
The artist has long been iconic in Europe, where his work is exhibited at the great museums, and he is perhaps best known as the Memphis Man -- the rebel who formed the Memphis design collaborative in the 1980s and inspired an explosion of unorthodox ideas in furniture and decorative arts that rocked the Western world.
If you have ever mixed multiple patterns in a single room, painted one wall a daring color, purchased a teapot with a little bird that whistles when the water's hot or infused your house with inspiring objects from other cultures, there are experts who'll say it's due to the influence of Sottsass and his group.
