Ettore Sottsass

ETTORE SOTTSASS (Innsbruck, Austria, 1917–Milan, 2007) for Memphis Milano, Italy.
City table. 1983.
Wood tabletop covered with decorative laminate, chrome-plated steel legs, and enameled aluminum supports.
With manufacturer’s plaque.
In good condition, with signs of wear consistent with its age.
Measurements: 72 × 160 × 85 cm.

The City table belongs to the central period of Memphis, the collective led by Sottsass that transformed international design in the 1980s by challenging functionalism and championing color, ornamentation, and industrial materials. Created in 1983, the model embodies one of the designer’s core ideas: structure and decoration are not separate realms, but inseparable parts of the object’s identity.

The decorative laminate—deliberately distinct from finishes traditionally considered “noble”—takes center stage here, while the legs, constructed from curved chrome-plated steel profiles, make the base the piece’s primary formal feature. This reversal of hierarchies, characteristic of Memphis, transforms an everyday object into one with a strong symbolic presence and positions the City as a representative testament to Sottsass’s transition from rationalism to postmodern design.

Ettore Sottsass was a key figure in 20th-century design and the founder of the Memphis group. His body of work spanned architecture, furniture, lighting, ceramics, and technological design; it is represented at MoMA in New York and was the subject of the retrospective *Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical* at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.