Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors: the exhibition at Triennale Milano

Metaphors is perhaps the most poetic, allegorical and at the same time rich in deep design work by the great Italian designer and architect Ettore Sottsass: a series of photographic artworks that have become one of the most important references for contemporary designers thanks to their ability to simultaneously abstract and synthesise the essence of living, together with all the qualities that make inhabitable spaces, the theatre of the most intimate and human feelings.

To this series is dedicated the fourth project of the exhibition cycle started in 2021 by Triennale Milano and dedicated to the figure of Sottsass, an appointment that focuses on his relationship with photography and comes after Struttura e colore, Il calcolo and La Parola. 
Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors has been realised in collaboration with Studio Sottsass and with the art direction of Christoph Radl and will remain on view in the permanent space Casa Lana until 21 April 2024.

Image Gianluca Di Ioia © Triennale Milano

The exhibition brings together a series of photographs, grouped under the name of Metaphors, taken by Ettore Sottsass between 1972 and 1978; the first three groups of photographs - Designs for the Fates of Man, Designs for the Rights of Man and Designs for the Needs of Animals - were exhibited in 1976 in Man Transforms, the opening group show of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, curated by Hans Hollein with Liza Taylor. The Engaged and Decorated series were taken after 1976 and after the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, during trips to America, Greece, the Middle East and Italy.

“Ettore Sottsass had the extraordinary ability to use the language of photography to give back to the world, in a clear and simple - and at the same time poetic and unique - way, his vision of man, space, places and contemporaneity, through images that still strike the eye of the observer, involving him in his moments of life and thought that, although distant in time, are still extremely vivid today”, says Stefano Boeri, President of Triennale Milano.

Marco Sammicheli, Director of the Museum of Italian Design at Triennale Milano, then states that “the use of photography, combined with drawing, recounts another mode of expression of Ettore Sottsass, who thanks to the use of symbols, experiences and overlapping of languages, succeeds in taking the viewer to places where he can understand, discover, imagine and ask himself new questions”.



The years between 1972 and 1976 were towards the end of Radical Architecture; for Sottsass this was a period of great critical reflection, in which he had almost stopped designing, in which he thought, drew, wrote and divided his time between his Milan studio and various Spanish peregrinations including Barcelona, Madrid, Almeria, Granada, but above all the stone deserts south-east of the Ebro and the wild valleys of the Pyrenees. On his travels he builds and photographs: he intervenes in the landscape initially with just a few signs, creating temporary structures with materials such as string, bits of wood, stakes, ribbons, cardboard boxes, leaves, branches, stones, strips of fabric. Then gradually the landscape also leaves space for the presence of man, with his questions.

The exhibition also includes the series of drawings Costruzioni, made in the same years as his travels; these are studies of architectural language, reflections on the environment, notes on anthropology, and analyses of the meaning of design which, while often starting from the study of a real object, are able to lead the viewer to broader meditations, which often go beyond the mere act of conceiving, to enter into symbolic worlds and reflection.

The Institutional Partners Lavazza Group and Salone del Mobile.Milano also support Triennale Milano for this exhibition.