Ettore Sottsass, Jr.
'Le Strutture Tremano' table, from the 'bau. haus art collection', designed 1979
Enamelled metal, glass, plastic laminated-wood.
115.5 x 61 x 61 cm
Manufactured by Studio Alchymia, Milan, Italy. Underside of base with manufacturer's label printed STUDIO/ALCHYMIA/MILANO.
Footnotes:
Provenance
The Estate of Evelyn Foster
Thence by descent
Bonhams, Los Angeles, 'Modern Design | Art', 30 September 2020, lot 240
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature
Renato Barilli, 'Arredo Alchemico', Domus, no. 607, June 1980, p. 35
Barbara Radice, Memphis, Milan, 1984, p. 15
Andrea Branzi, The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design, Cambridge, 1984, p. 136
Gilles de Bure, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Collection Rivages/Styles, dirigée par Gilles de Bure, Paris, 1987, p. 61
Albrecht Bangert, Italian Furniture Design: Ideas Styles Movements, Munich, 1988, p. 62
Kazuko Sato, Contemporary Italian Design, Berlin, 1988, pp. 17, 20
Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, Gabrielle Leuthäuser, Peter Gössel, et al, Twentieth-Century Furniture Design, Cologne, 1991, p. 214
Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass: A Critical Biography, London, 1993, pp. 195, 197
Giuliana Gramigna, Repertorio del Design Italiano 1950-2000, Volume II, Turin, 2003, p. 290
Glenn Adamson; Jane Pavitt, eds., Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2011, p. 40
Cindi Strauss, Germano Celant, et al., Italian Radical Design: The Dennis Freedman Collection, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New Haven, 2020, p. 121

The present model is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Nick Wright
Co-author of Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage, London, 2012

Dishonesty of Materials

Charles Jencks identified the death of Modern architecture as taking place on July 15, 1972. 'At 3,32 (or thereabouts)' the Pruitt-Igoe projects were demolished. Like so many modernist blocks, their architects had promised good housing for all using an economy of design and modern materials impervious to the elements and fashion. In fact, their design was so compromised they were dynamited less than 20 years after construction.

In their seminal postmodern text, Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown documented the Vegas strip during the fat Elvis era. Succeeding Gio Ponti as Domus' editor in 1979, Alessandro Mendini wrote of the architect's obligation to accommodate the taste, even the bad taste, of the client. The postmodern citizen would be the determinant of design, the historic city not a gaudy maras to be bulldozed and built anew along rational lines, but accommodated by the architect whose obligation was to add to it in sympathy with its citizen's needs AND desires. (Who doesn't love fat Elvis?) This was the intellectual thrust of postmodernism.

It was Alessandro Guerrero's supergroup, Alchymia, through which these ideas were first expressed in three dimensions. Designed in 1979 as a series of prototypes by Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi, amongst others, the 'Bauhaus One' collection was conceived along the lines of a fashion show. Pieces were to be exhibited for one season only, sold, another collection produced for the next, 'Bauhaus Two'.

The star of that first show was Mendini's 'Proust'. The most significant chair since Gerrit Rietveld's 'Red and Blue Chair', it began as a reproduction monster-piece found in a Milan junk shop. Signalling the return to decoration made superfluous by functionalism, a section of a Paul Signac painting was projected onto the whole and copied by artists Pier Antonio Volpini and Prospero Rasulo, the aim to fuse kitsch and high culture.

Sottsass' 'Svincolo' lamp in the same 'Bauhaus One' collection went so far as to employ bare neon tube lighting redolent of the Vegas strip. In fact, a take on the Italian autostrada illumination, the surface decoration on the totem featured Sottsass' now famous 'Bacterium' pattern. If stared at too long, the design causes a hallucinatory effect as the bacteria seemingly squirm before the eyes.

People are not purely rational. Indeed, much of our behaviour is predicated on emotion, logic being a means of post-rationalisation - the decorative laminate applied to chipboard. Architects must acknowledge this duality. Yes, we want our built environment to provide accommodation, but it should also speak to our emotions. Design can seduce, shock, delight, even delude in its trickery and Alchymia does just this. Revelling in a dishonesty of materials such as decorative laminate and rattle-can paint, the group alchemised base metal into architectural gold.

Lappino Binazzi had been a member of the Italian radical UFO group of the late sixties. The big film studios were in financial difficulties, and seeing their discarded props and advertising, he appropriated the signage in a series of lamps. The 'Paramount' lamp was first produced by Groupo UFO in 1970. The PARAsol began the title, the ceramic MOUNTain beneath completed it. Together with the MGM lamp, the 'Paramount' was reissued by Alchymia in 1979 for the 'Bauhaus One' collection, its new context making explicit the postmodern implications. Is there a more alchemical process than actors playing out a scripted fiction which, when projected onto a flat screen, creates a 3D reality that feels as vivid as any lived experience?

Sottsass' 'Structure Tremano' in the present sale is also from 'Bauhaus One' collection and distinguished from later Belux and Kumewa editions by the glitter lacquer. Alessandro Mendini estimated that on average about six of each of the 'Bauhaus One' pieces were produced. Perhaps because of his association with the Memphis group, which built on Alchymia's blueprint, Sottsass' pieces are amongst those items made in greater numbers. Nonetheless, an original Alchymia 'Structure Tremano' is rare. Moreover, like all the Bauhaus One collection, it needs to be understood intellectually - 'read' as Mendini put it - to be fully appreciated.

The plinth is made of chipboard – base metal - and covered in shinny white laminate – gold - whilst its scale suggests it is designed to bear great weight. In a historical sense it does. The tubular steel legs reference Marcel Breuer's work at the Bauhaus. Revolutionary in the 1920s, tubular steel chairs like the 'Wassily' had, by the late seventies, become as much a cliché as the corporate lobbies they furnished, and this is the 'function' of the 'Structure Tremano'. It is not the wobbly looking tubular legs which tremble in the shock wave from the Pruitt-Igoe's detonation, but Modernism itself. In the vacant lot was built Memphis Milano, Alessandro Mendini's Groningher Museum and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim.
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: TP
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