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Baumeister Baroque
von Adam Nathaniel Furman,
London
Foto: Julian Furman
www.adamnathanielfurman.com

“Baumeister Barock” is a series of five architectural capriccios created

for the “Sottsass. Father & Son” exhibition as part of the Vienna

Design Week 2015. The exhibition confronted the renowned ceramics

by Ettore Sottsass Junior (1917-2007) for the manufacturing firm Bitossi

with selected architectural drawings by his father, Ettore Sottsass

Senior (1892-1954), who worked as an architect in South Tyrol in the

period before the Second World War. In my capriccios, the two

Sottsass’ worlds come together, generating an imaginative style. It

combines the psychedelic colours and shapes, which characterise the

ecstatic futuristic utopianism of the 1970s and hence the works of

Sottsass Junior, with the romantic visions of alpine landscapes and

architectures, as Sottsass Senior created them in the first half of the
20th century. The series comprises an alpine fortress, which appears

like an extraterrestrial base station; a mountain cave with a strange

altar inside, which seems to originate from some kind of techno

mithras cult; a mountain village with village hall, post office and

guesthouse, which dissolves in a whirling stream of colours; a village
barn, where peasants and programmers could come together for a

dance; and a mountain panorama intersected by modern infrastruc-

tures pushing into the landscape as geometric displays.

Adam Nathaniel Furman