Ettore Sottsass - Austria (1917 - 2008)

Ettore Sottsass Jr, who died at his home in Milan on New Year's Eve, was a 20th century Renaissance man - an architect, designer, painter, craftsman, philosopher, writer and photographer - whose work for Alchymia and Memphis at the end of the 1970s put an end to the linear development of Modernism and changed the way we think about design for ever.

Sottsass is not only one of the most influential designers of the latter half of the twentieth century but also one of the most paradoxical. While he has had a successful career producing industrial designs for the mainstream corporation Olivetti, for everything from typewriters and computers to office landscapes, he has also created strikingly unconventional consumer-oriented objects that challenge the bourgeois audience at which they are aimed to reassess its assumptions of the limits of "good taste." Between 1981 and 1988, Sottsass and a small international group of like-minded designers who called themselves Memphis created nonconformist furniture. The totemic "Carlton" room divider is an outstanding example of his Memphis designs. Although intended for a luxury market and of fine workmanship, it is made of cheap plastic laminates rather than fine woods. The vivid colors and seemingly random interplay of solids and voids suggest avant-garde painting and sculpture. Yet, typical of Sottsass, underlying the surface brilliance is an entirely logical structural system, of real and implied equilateral triangles.

Links:     Obituary: Ettore Sottsass       Information from the Design Museum