Carlton Room Divider

The collective Memphis sparked a revolt in the design world in 1981 with the launch of a collection combining bold geometries and wild patterns with banal materials like aluminum and Formica. One of the most striking pieces was Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton Room Divider, a bookshelf and cabinet that combines different colors of plastic laminate in a tiered, anthropomorphic form that seems to recall the head and arms of an ancient idol or totem. This famous piece also derives from Sottsass’s early work in the 1960s designing large laminate scultpures, or Superboxes, for the firm Poltronova.