In September 1981, Ettore Sottsass sat in a taxi in central Milan and assumed a bomb had gone off. The street was blocked by a crowd of a thousand people. They were there for him, for fifty-seven objects in cheap plastic laminate that would define the look of the entire decade.

Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007) and the Memphis Group: how a 64-year-old Italian architect with a Compasso d’Oro and a typewriter in the Museum of Modern Art created the most recognizable design movement of the 1980s, walked away from it four years later, and spent the rest of his life being reduced to it.

It runs from a Montenegrin labour camp and Mussolini’s last army, through Italian postwar state housing and the design of Italy’s first transistorized mainframe computer at Olivetti, to a hospital bed in Palo Alto, an underground magazine co-edited by Allen Ginsberg, and the night a stuck Bob Dylan record gave a group of twenty-somethings its name. It covers the Carlton bookcase, the Tahiti lamp, the Ultrafragola mirror, the Valentine typewriter, the Elea 9003, David Bowie’s Memphis collection at Sotheby’s, and the sixty years of ceramics, glass, architecture and publishing that Memphis buried.

Featuring work by Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, George Sowden, Martine Bedin, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, Aldo Cibic, Masanori Umeda, Barbara Radice, Alessandro Mendini and Andrea Branzi.

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