The Planet as Festival: Study for a Dispenser of Incense, LSD, Marijuana, Opium, Laughing Gas, project (Perspective)

Ettore Sottsass

1972–1973

A graphite-on-paper study in which Ettore Sottsass imagines a monumental, ceremonial 'dispenser' that would broadcast incense and drugs across a festival-like landscape, proposing architecture as a machine for collective sensory experience.

Your eye is arrested by a central columnar platform belching spiraling smoke and stark, radiating beams, while tiny tents, palm trees, and cliffs are drawn in fine, precise pencil so the human scale feels delicate and theatrical beneath the device’s presence.

Made in the early 1970s, the work ties Sottsass’s design thinking to countercultural rituals and psychedelia, opening up architecture as atmosphere-making and social performance rather than merely utilitarian form.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Graphite Perspective Landscape Ritual Participatory art

Exhibitions

Architectural Studies and Projects

1975

Visionary Architecture

1960

Painting and Sculpture in Architecture

1949

Projects: Pier 18

1971