“A room within a room.” This is how the Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass described the innovative solution he devised in 1963 for the Milan apartment of his friend Giovanni Lana, a printer, lithographer and art collector. In order to maximize the 668 square feet, Sottsass compressed typically separate rooms into a single, fluid space, dividing different zones with perforated ash panels that let in light and allowed for shifting perspectives: an outer perimeter accommodated a study and dining area, while the inner section featured the main living area, with three sofas in a “U” shape.
Sottsass is considered one of Italy’s most important architects and designers and is celebrated for, among other things, his design of the Olivetti Valentine typewriter and for founding the Memphis Group in 1980, when he was 63. But his design of Casa Lana came earlier, and it shows his gradual move away from modernism. He was rejecting the functionalist idea of the home as a rational, efficient system in favor of a belief that it was a social stage, where design and objects encourage interaction and foster personal, everyday rituals.
Following Lana’s death in 2019, the apartment’s central room was carefully dismantled and rebuilt at a dedicated space in the Triennale di Milano museum. Today, more than six decades after it was designed, Casa Lana feels just as groundbreaking as ever. “[In Casa Lana] one always has a complete sense of one’s life,” Sottsass wrote in 1967, “because everything is there, in a small square where one moves around and encounters others.”
