Ettore Sottsass was a renowned Austrian-born Italian architect and designer whose work is instantly recognisable for the manner in which it disrupted tradition and expectation with bold colours and innovative forms.
Born in 1917, he followed in his father’s footsteps by studying architecture, graduating from the Politecnico di Torino in Turin in 1939. Following on from the Second World War, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio experimenting and exploring with a wide range of materials: from ceramics to furniture and from jewellery to architecture.
In 1958, Sottsass became a design consultant with the manufacturer Olivetti, and it was during this period that he started developing his use of bold colours, that began blurring the boundaries between pop culture and industrial design. Amongst the designs concepts that he created for Olivetti, was the Valentine typewriter in 1969, that ‘subverted the status quo’ of typewriter design, and it remains a milestone in the field, capturing the ethos of the counter-culture emerging in the late 1960s. Throughout this decade and the 1970s, Sottsass travelled widely, absorbing what he experienced and reproducing it in his larger, sometimes abstract work.
Following his time at Olivetti, Sottsass formed the influential and groundbreaking Memphis Group, or Memphis Milano, in 1980. Active until 1987, its postmodern furniture, lighting, fabrics and objects were characterised by colourful and abstract decoration, asymmetrical forms, and references to earlier and exotic designs and styles.
One of their great breaks from the immediate past was the idea that form and function should stand in equal partnership – the Memphis artists believed in an uninhibited creative freedom. As a result, the Memphis Group changed the course of design history, creating an aesthetic that represented a distinct moment in time immediately recognisable as a 1980s look. Its legacy is significant in allowing a new generation of designers to break all the rules.
