THE PLANET AS A FESTIVAL: ettore sottsass’ UTOPIA WITHOUT CITIES
Long before the Memphis group turned him into a postmodern icon, Ettore Sottsass was asking a far more destabilizing question: what if permanence was never the goal? In 1972, the Italian architect and designer published Il Pianeta come Festival (The Planet as a Festival) in architecture magazine Casabella, a proposal that attempts to step outside architecture altogether.
There are no plans, no sections, no systems to be implemented. Instead, the project imagines the Earth as a continuous field of human events, where architecture no longer stabilizes life. Sottsass describes a world structured by temporary gatherings instead of being organized through fixed forms.
The city, as we know it, disappears as a stable entity. There are no centers, no hierarchies, no enduring monuments anchoring space. In its place, a dispersed planetary landscape unfolds, animated by events. Rafts drift from the sources of the Tocantins toward the sea, carrying listeners through landscapes of chamber music. A temple hosts erotic dances, unfolding as a slow ritual of concentration and self-awareness. Dispensers release waltzes, tangos, rock, or even altered states through incense and substances, turning atmosphere into architecture. Elsewhere, vast but fragile infrastructures appear, such as a panoramic road stretching like a lightweight, ‘useless’ version of the Great Wall, designed not for defense but for wandering, cycling, and stopping for picnics. These fragments describe a world composed of moments, remaining episodic, precise and open-ended.
in 1972, Sottsass published Il Pianeta come Festival in Casabella | image via L’Arengario
a proposal AGAINST PERMANENCE
Il Pianeta come Festival by Ettore Sottsass emerges at a precise historical moment, when architecture begins to question its own foundations. In late 1960s Italy, the promises of modernism start to fracture. The rational clarity of postwar planning feels increasingly detached from lived experience, while consumer culture transforms the city into a system of production and consumption. The political climate intensifies this rupture. The protests of 1968 and their aftermath challenge institutional authority, fixed hierarchies, and the very idea of stability as a social good.
Within this context, a generation of architects begins to rethink the discipline from within. Groups such as Superstudio and Archizoom Associati extend architecture to planetary scales, proposing continuous grids and endless urban fields that expose the logic of modern systems by exaggerating them. Sottsass moves in a different direction, beginning to dissolve architecture and removing the system altogether.
Sottsass describes a world structured by temporary gatherings | image via L’Arengario
from objects and infrastructures to situations
By the early 1970s, Sottsass is already a central figure in Italian design through his work with Olivetti. Yet this success sharpens a growing discomfort. Design, he begins to realize, is becoming inseparable from a system that reduces life to consumption. Objects accumulate, infrastructures harden, cities expand, but the quality of experience does not follow. Il Pianeta come Festival emerges from this tension as a radical refusal of design as a primary organizer of life.
If society is no longer organized around work, production, and efficiency, architecture loses its traditional function as an instrument of control and optimization. Factories, offices, and rigid housing systems give way to spaces of encounter. What remains are minimal structures, platforms, columns, and roofs that barely intervene in the landscape, acting as supports for human interaction. Architecture becomes secondary, as it no longer defines space in advance, but enables situations to emerge.
a dispenser of incense, LSD, marijuana, opium, laughing gas | © Adagp, Paris Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn Image reference : 4N97159 Image presentation : GrandPalaisRmnPhoto
LEARNING FROM OTHER WAYS OF LIVING
Modern architecture assumes that stability produces order, that lasting structures can organize life efficiently and rationally. In Sottsass’ Il Pianeta come Festival, permanence fixes behaviors, stabilizes hierarchies, and embeds systems of control into space. The city, with its rigid infrastructures, can constrain life as much as it supports it. Temporality introduces a different logic. When structures are temporary, they cannot dominate for long. Space remains open, adaptable, and continuously reinterpreted by those who use it. Order emerges from participation.
This thinking is also informed by Sottsass’s encounters with cultures outside the Western architectural canon, particularly during his travels in India, where space is often shaped less by permanence or formal planning than by ritual, time, and collective meaning. Seasonal gatherings, temporary settlements, and festival-based occupations construct environments that are spatially rich without relying on monumental form. These are not informal versions of architecture, but expressions of a different spatial logic, where use precedes form and temporality implies continuity through repetition. Il Pianeta come Festival imagines a world in which architecture begins with lived experience, extending this condition to a planetary scale.
The drawings of the project, many produced with Japanese artist Tiger Tateishi, make this vision tangible. They depict a scattered world of small gatherings, where figures dance, rest, and move through open landscapes punctuated by simple architectural elements, including platforms, stages, columns, and roofs, which appear as archetypes rather than finished objects. Their scale is ambiguous, their function indeterminate. Architecture operates more as prop, enabling action without prescribing it. No masterplan or system is organizing the whole. The planet becomes a cluster of temporary sites, activated for a moment before dissolving again, where infrastructure gives way to experience.
Stadium with large habitable levels for the careful observation of the water and sky: in transparent perspec with lenticular dome to increase the depths of the sky and the number of stars visible | © Adagp, Paris Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn Image reference : 4N97151 Image presentation : GrandPalaisRmnPhoto
TOWARD A TEMPORARY CONDITION
For decades, this dimension of Sottsass’s work remained overshadowed by the visual impact of Memphis. Yet its relevance has become increasingly clear. Contemporary life is already shifting toward forms of temporality. Festivals, biennials, and pop-up infrastructures generate short-lived urban conditions, while climate instability and migration challenge the viability of permanence itself. At the same time, digital networks detach activity from fixed locations, allowing new forms of distributed living in which coordination replaces centralization.
In this context, Il Pianeta come Festival can be read as an anticipation of event-based urbanism. It also resonates with emerging discussions around reversible architecture and post-carbon construction, where lightness, adaptability, and disassembly become essential design criteria. What once appeared as a speculative provocation now aligns with a growing need to rethink architecture beyond permanence.
At the same time, the project raises unresolved questions. If life is organized entirely through temporary gatherings, what replaces continuity and care? Who coordinates these events, and under what conditions do they emerge? The disappearance of fixed structures may open space for freedom, but it may also produce new forms of instability.
Sottsass proposes a different relationship between life and form. Not a world designed in advance, but one that continuously reorganizes itself.
Rafts for listening to chamber music. They set off from the sources of the Tocantins, in the midst of the jungle, and reach the sea. During the pause on the shore one can change rafts, or stay on the ground collecting fruit or mushrooms growing there, if so desiring. Or look at the birds of Paradise, the pale blue polychrome phenomenon, cloud or feathers or flying cushion | image via @ettoresottsass_official
Ettore Sottsass, detail from A Dispenser of Incense, LSD, Marijuna, Opium and Laughing Gas (1972) | image via @walkerartcenter
Credits © Adagp, Paris Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn Image reference : 4N97150 Image presentation : GrandPalaisRmnPhoto
Ettore Sottsass, A Large Dispenser of Waltzes, Tangos, Rock and Cha cha cha (1972) | image via @walkerartcenter
Sottsass describes a world structured by temporary gatherings | image via Studio Bruno Tonini
The city, as we know it, disappears as a stable entity | image via Studio Bruno Tonini
Temple for erotic dances to perform and to watch. The rite proceeds according to a slow process of concentration and lighting which gradually leads to the deepest and most liberating knowledge of one’s own sexuality. cat no 9 | © Adagp, Paris Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn Image reference : 4N97158 Image presentation : GrandPalaisRmnPhoto
© Adagp, Paris Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn Image reference : 4N97157 Image presentation : GrandPalaisRmnPhoto
Ettore Sottsass. There is a Planet exhibition at Triennale Design Museum | image via AMDL CIRCLE
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