Bdbarcelona Shiva Vase
SHIVA FLOWER VASE
SHIVA FLOWER VASE
Designed By Ettore Sottsass
Suggestive, insouciant and shocking the Shiva vase represents everything that BD Barcelona Design has come to be associated with over the years. A clear manifesto conceived by Ettore Sottsass for the nascent project back in 1973, one of its first and most enduring designs in fact.
DESIGNER
ETTORE SOTTSASS
Ettore Sottsass (Insbruck, Austria, 1917) was a grandee of late 20th century Italian design, best known as the founder of the early 1980s Memphis collective.
Renowned for his iconic products for Olivetti, as well as beautiful glass and ceramics, Sottsass is one of the best known modern Italian designers. He is also one of the most illustrious collaborators with BD. In the 1970s, ten years before he formed the mythical Memphis group, Sottsass was a regular visitor to Barcelona.
He had fallen in love with a beautiful student at the Eina School. Fruit of this love affair and his time in Spain is this vase of rose-coloured ceramic, which he named Shiva.
BD had only just been founded and so the design of this modern fertility symbol was even more poignant. The genius and risqué character of the master is preserved in the BD catalogue with this iconic piece that is still in production today.
INFORMATION
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BRAND
Bdbarcelona
PRODUCT TYPE
Vase
DESIGNER
Ettore Sottsass
PRODUCTION
Made in Spain
WEIGHT
- 1.1Kg
- 2.4 lbs
MATERIALS & FINISHES
Pink glazed ceramic
PACKAGING
The vase is delivered wrapped in cellaire and inside a cardboard box.
YEAR
1973
DIMENSIONS
- 17 x 7 x h.23 cm
- 7 x 2,7 x h.9 inch
DETAILS
SMALL ARCHITECTURES
“I continue to produce small, small, small architectures, such as this ceramic piece, for example, a little like monuments, a little like tombs, a little like the abandoned temples of the gods, a little like the ruins of the ancient and unknown civilization in which something –the say– was known; it is said that they understood the axes, the curves, the intersections, perhaps even the causation of the courses of the cosmic bodies, along which each day slide the private vertices of the atoms that make up our fragile flesh and blood”.
An illustrious figure launched the roster of designs in the first BD catalogue. Memphis was not to appear on the scene for another ten years, but Ettore Sottsass had already by then been visiting India fora decade.
His “little architectures”, such as this flower vase, owe a great deal to that culture.
