Memphis Group
The Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, was an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass. It was active from 1980 to 1987. The group designed postmodern furniture, lighting, fabrics, carpets, ceramics, glass and metal objects.
The Memphis Group's work often incorporated plastic laminate and terrazzo materials and was characterized by ephemeral design featuring colorful and abstract decoration as well as asymmetrical shapes, sometimes arbitrarily alluding to exotic or earlier styles and designs.
History
Memphis was born on the evening of December 6, 1980, when Sottsass invited a group of young designers and architects to discuss the future of design. Together, they wanted to change the concept of what design had been focused on, which had been Modernism and aimed to do so by creating and forming a new design collective. After their initial meeting, the group went away to brainstorm different ideas and concepts, and three months later came back together ready to share over a hundred drawings they had produced during that time.
The inspiration behind naming themselves "Memphis" came about during their first meeting when Bob Dylan's record "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" had been playing repeatedly in the background. "Memphis" is the name of a city in Tennessee, which was named after a capital city of ancient Egypt. The group of designers used the ambiguity behind the name to represent and symbolise their ambiguous design philosophies of furniture, objects and textiles. Sottsass showed great interest in the middle-class taste, the traditions of the Third World and the East, and unspoiled nature. Sottsass left the group in 1985 to focus on his design and architecture firm, Sottsass Associati. The group disbanded in 1987.
