Ettore Sottsass
Founder of the Memphis Group.
Ettore Sottsass designed the Valentine typewriter for Olivetti and founded Memphis in 1981. He made design colourful and provocative.
Ettore Sottsass was born in 1917 in Innsbruck, Austria. His father was an architect, and the family moved to Italy. He studied architecture at the Politecnico in Turin, graduating in 1939. During the Second World War he served in the Italian army and spent time in a prison camp. In 1947 he opened his own office in Milan.
From the late 1950s he was a consultant to the office-machine company Olivetti. He designed the Elea 9003 mainframe computer, which won an important Italian design award, and in 1969, with Perry King, the Valentine portable typewriter in bright red plastic. It was marketed as a typewriter for every occasion except the office and became an icon of pop and youth culture.
Sottsass travelled widely, including in India, and was influenced by the objects, rituals and colours of other cultures. He made ceramics and sculptural furniture, and in the 1970s he was a leading figure in Radical Design, which challenged modernism's demands for function and neutrality.
In 1981 he founded the design group Memphis in Milan. According to the story, the name came from a Bob Dylan song that was playing when the group met. Memphis made furniture and objects in laminate, with bold colours, unexpected patterns and playful forms. The Carlton room divider became the group's best-known work. The 1981 exhibition provoked both delight and outrage and shaped the visual language of the 1980s.
Sottsass was married to the writer and translator Fernanda Pivano and later lived with the writer Barbara Radice. He died in Milan in 2007. He is seen as one of the most important designers since the Second World War and as the one who showed that design could be emotional, provocative and poetic.