Ettore Sottsass
Designer, architect, aspiring painter, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) treasures the teachings of his father, an architect from Trentino who was a pupil of Josef Hoffmann in Vienna during the Secession. After graduating from the Turin Polytechnic in 1939, he worked with Carlo Mollino and Gino Levi Montalcini, before moving to Milan in 1946. In the 1950s his love of painting led him to integrate colour into his furnishings through coloured metals, stripes and squares, black and white and strong colours. His twenty-year collaboration with Olivetti has been rewarded by two Compassi d'Oro, for the first Italian electronic calculator, the Elea 9003 (1959), and for the Valentine portable typewriter (1969). The ironic and transgressive style of his creations reaches its peak with the Memphis Group, which he founded in 1981, a popularizer of the pop-postmodern aesthetic that distinguishes his most famous furniture.
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