Ettore Sottsass

Background

Ettore Sottsass was born in Innsbruck on 14 September 1917 and grew up in Turin, where his father, also an architect, practised. He graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Torino in 1939 and, after the war, opened his own architecture and industrial design studio in Milan in 1947. He died on 31 December 2007.

Signature Style

His work crosses furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, lighting, office machines and buildings, and is often defined by bold colour. In 1980 he founded the Memphis Group, a Milan collective of the 1980s that set out against the design establishment's idea of good taste and used the bright palette of Pop art together with laminate and terrazzo.

Notable Works

For Olivetti he worked on the Elea 9003 mainframe, awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1959, and on the Valentine typewriter of 1969 with Perry A. King. His Memphis pieces include the Carlton bookcase of 1981, and later work includes the Mandarin chair for Knoll and the Nine-0 chair for Emeco.

Legacy

Sottsass Associati, the consultancy he set up in 1980, continues his work. Kartell took part in the 1972 MoMA exhibition with living modules designed by Sottsass, and in 2015 it paid tribute to him with a collection of projects he had designed in 2004: one vase and two stools, among them Colonna and Pilastro.