It was on the evening of 11 December 1980. In the living room of his home in Milano, along with Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass welcomed colleagues, designers and architects, to talk about new forms of expression. Nothing has been the same since then. Ettore’s friends on hand that evening were Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, George J. Sowden, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanini. Over the next few days they discussed and planned a revolutionary collection of design objects, which then took form in just a few months. On 9 February 1981 they gathered again – with over 100 drawings offurnishings on the table. Memphis lives!
Memphis in the 1980s – building on the experiences of Radical Design in the 1960s – experimented with new languages, making it possible to redefine the anthropological relations between people and objects. This Nuovo Design fully responded to the need to reflect the requirements of a complex society. It was no longer sufficient for an object to be simply “functional”; the object was now charged with symbolic, poetic and affective meanings. In domestic space, these unconventional pieces of furniture created new, conflictual interactions, making a clean break with the previous rationalist stylistic unity.
Memphis was subsequently joined by Arquitectonica, Thomas Bley, Andrea Branzi, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Shiro Kuramata, Javier Mariscal, Peter Shire, Gerard Taylor, Masanori Umeda, Marco Zanini.
The unique pieces by Memphis are exhibited and are part of permanent collections in some of the most important art and design museums in thw world. A few examples: Centre Pompidou, Parigi; Hong Kong Design Center, Hong Kong; Modern Art Museum, Shanghai: La Triennale, Milano; MaMBo, Bologna; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; ICA Miami, Miami; KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf; Victoria & Albert Museum, Londra; Design Museum, Londra; Jewish Museum, New York; The Met Breuer, New York; Modernist Museum, Mount Dora; MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles.