Group of Memphis

The Groupe of Memphis was in Italy during the Années 1980 a movement of influential Design and Architecture.

The group was founded in Italy by Ettore Sottsass on December 11th, 1980, and its members solved to meet once again with their in February 1981 projects. The result was a beginning cordially acclaimed with the Living room of the Mobile of Milan of 1981; one saw there the most prestigious pieces of furniture of the world. The group counted thereafter among its members Michele de Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, Aldo Cibic, Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Michael Graves, Javier Mariscal, Barbara Radice, Martine Bedin, George J. Sowden and Nathalie of Pasquier. It separated in 1988.

Named according to the song of Bob Dylan Stuck Inside off Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again of the album Fair one Fair, the movement was a reaction against the designs of “block box” of the post- Bauhaus of the Seventies. It had a direction of the humor which missed at the time in the design. Imagined to mix the styles, the colors and materials of the XXe century, it positioned like a fashion rather than like an academic movement. He hoped to make disappear the international Style where the post-modernism had gone bankrupt, preferring to make reappear purely and simply the modernism and to continue rather it than to make a second reading of it.

While designers as Philippe Starck was influenced by Memphis, the continuous rise of the minimalism during the Années 1990 saw a return to “serious”.

External bonds

Article of the '' Guardian '' on Memphis group
Collection of the Design Museum of London

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