Ettore Sottsass: “Mise en scène”

From December 12, 2025 to February 15, 2026, Triennale Milano opens a new chapter in its research with the exhibition Ettore Sottsass. Mise en scène, curated by Barbara Radice, Micaela Sessa, and Studio Sottsass, with art direction by Christoph Radl. The exhibition does not approach the myth of the designer in broad strokes, but enters — with discretion and intimacy — his most private dimension. Born in 1917 in Innsbruck and raised between the rigor of the Trentino mountains and the rationalist Turin of the Politecnico, Sottsass always navigated modernity with an independent gaze. This exhibition portrays him beyond theoretical manifestos and far from the iconic objects everyone knows: here, the life behind the project takes shape, where daily gestures and relationships become narrative material.


Delfino Sisto Legnani-DSL studio © Triennale Milano

At the center of the exhibition are around 1,200 photographs, in black and white and color, taken between 1976 and 2007 — the period from his first meeting with Barbara Radice to the year of his death. It is an archive that composes an “emotional landscape” made of travels, homes, visual notes, friendships, work encounters, and moments of pause. Milan and Filicudi, the United States and French Polynesia, India, Iran, Syria: scattered fragments of a single narrative in which public and private cease to be opposing categories. The exhibition recalls how, for Sottsass, even the simplest object carried meaning: an ashtray capable of changing the rhythm of a break, a bookcase that safeguards love stories, a desk that restores humanity to everyday actions. As he himself stated, “a designer should know that objects can become the instrument of an existential rite.”


Ettore Sottsass, India, 1980

Mise en scène refers precisely to this: to life as a small performance, a continuous improvisation around an essential framework. The photographs on display capture this dimension without filters, telling the story not only of a great architect, but of a man who learned to observe the world with the same intensity with which he designed it.


Delfino Sisto Legnani-DSL studio © Triennale Milano