Memphis Again

A concise, dynamic introduction to the Italian postmodern design group

This small-format volume presents more than 200 furniture and objects made between 1981 and 1986 for the Memphis collection. Memphis was an Italian design and architecture collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, a leading exponent of 1980s postmodernism. It was the outcome of a long process that began at the Olivetti company in Ivrea, where Sottsass had been the design coordinator since the late 1950s, and continued with the research of the radical architecture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in Florence and Europe.
Memphis Again documents the eponymous 2022 Milan exhibition on the group, for which Memphis works--bookshelves, tables, desks, chairs, sofa beds, lamps, pots, bowls, rugs and more--were dynamically installed in chronological order in the style of a fashion show, with quotes by critics, architects and designers projected on the walls. Works by Sottsass, Michele De Lucchi, George J. Sowden, Martine Bedin, Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Marco Zanini, Matteo Thun, Peter Shire, Aldo Cibic, Nathalie du Pasquier, Gerard Taylor and Masanori Umeda are featured.