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.