For over fifty years, Ettore Sottsass has been a pillar of Italian design. Though he is known for his pioneering work with the design collective Memphis in the 1980s, his body of work spans several mediums and brands, including glass and ceramics for Alessi and electronic devices for Olivetti.
Ettore Sottsass - A Life in Design, on display at London's Design Museum from March 29 to June 10, 2007, celebrates the designer's 90th birthday.
With a father like Ettore Sottsass Sr., an architect himself, it was inevitable that the young Sottsass, born in Innsbruck in 1917, would follow in his footsteps.
After moving his family to Italy so that he could attend architecture school at Turin University, he was drafted into the Italian army in 1939 and served until the war's end.
He got his start in the business helping out his dad and only later started his own company. As a result of his time in New York City in the late '50s, Sottsass decided to devote himself to industrial design and took a job as a consultant for Olivetti, an Italian industrial conglomerate, in their fledgling electronics division.
Here he developed a line of groundbreaking technological products, the aesthetics of which reflected his appreciation for pop art and Beat culture; examples include the first Italian computer, the Elea 9003, and the bright red plastic 1970 Valentine typewriter.
Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Martine Bedin, and Michele De Lucchi were just a few of the younger, internationally renowned avant-garde designers who joined Sottsass in forming Memphis in 1980.
In an effort to bring back the spirit of Radical Design while subverting the standards of sleek minimalism popular in the '70s, they manufactured items with plastic and laminate surfaces, kitsch geometric patterns, and bright colors. As a result of its popularity in the early 1980s, Memphis became a focal point of the media.
In 1985, Sottsass decided to leave the collective to devote more time to Sottsass Associati, the architecture and design firm he founded in Milan and where he continues to this day.
Since his return to architecture, he has finished numerous residential and public projects, including the Malpensa 2000 airport outside of Milan, and is now working on glass and ceramics.
