Ettore Sottsass (Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛttore sotˈtsas]; 14 September 1917 – 31 December 2007) was an Italian architect and product designer. He was known for his designs of furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting, homeware and office supplies, and also worked on numerous buildings and interiors, often defined by bold colours.
Sottsass was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and grew up in Turin, where his father, also named Ettore Sottsass, was an architect. His father belonged to the modernist architecture group Movimento Italiano per l'Architettura Razionale (MIAR), led by Giuseppe Pagano.
Sottsass attended the Politecnico di Torino in Turin and graduated in 1939 with a degree in architecture.
After the Allies reached Italy, Sottsass joined the Italian Republican Fascist Party and enlisted in the Monterosa Division of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, led by Benito Mussolini, to fight in the mountains alongside German forces. He later recounted his experiences as a lieutenant in the Monterosa Division in his autobiography Scritto di notte, published by Adelphi.
After his time in the military, Sottsass opened his own architecture and design firm in Milan. He began designing furniture and experimenting with different colours, patterns and shapes. His work was often associated with pop culture through his brightly coloured, whimsical objects, many of which were made from glass and ceramic.
After returning home, Sottsass worked as an architect with his father, often on new modernist versions of buildings that had been destroyed during the war. In 1947, living in Milan, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio, where he began to create work in a variety of media, including ceramic, painting, sculpture, furniture, photography, jewellery, architecture and interior design.
In 1949, Sottsass married Fernanda Pivano, a writer, journalist, translator and critic. From 1954 to 1957, he was a member of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, resigning due to the movement's perceived aggression and its lack of professionalism.
In 1956, Sottsass travelled to New York City and began working in the office of George Nelson. He and Pivano travelled widely while working for Nelson, and returned to Italy after a few months. During the same year, Sottsass was commissioned by the American entrepreneur Irving Richards for an exhibition of his ceramics.
Back in Italy in 1957, Sottsass joined Poltronova, a semi-industrial producer of contemporary furniture, as an artistic consultant. Much of the furniture he worked on there influenced the designs he would later create with Memphis Milano.
In 1956, Sottsass was hired by Adriano Olivetti as a design consultant for Olivetti, to design electronic devices and develop the first Italian mainframe computer, the Elea 9003, for which he was awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1959. His design for the MC 19 electric adding machine (with Hans von Klier) was awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1970. At Olivetti, he also designed office equipment, typewriters and furniture, including the Synthesis 45 office chair. Through colour, form and styling, Sottsass brought office equipment into the realm of popular culture. His first typewriters, the Tekne 3 and the Praxis 48, were characterised by their sobriety and angularity. With Perry A. King, Sottsass created the Valentine typewriter in 1969, considered a milestone in 20th-century design and featured in the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, London's Design Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
While continuing to design for Olivetti in the 1960s, Sottsass developed a range of objects reflecting his personal experiences travelling in the United States and India. These included large altar-like ceramic sculptures and his "Superboxes", radical sculptural gestures presented as consumer products and conceptual statements. Covered in bold and colourful simulated custom laminates, they were precursors to Memphis, a movement which came more than a decade later. Around this time, Sottsass said: "I didn't want to do any more consumerist products, because it was clear that the consumerist attitude was quite dangerous." His work from the late 1960s to the 1970s was defined by experimental collaborations with younger designers such as Superstudio and Archizoom Associati, and association with the Radical movement, culminating in the foundation of Memphis at the turn of the decade.
In the early 1970s, he designed the modular office equipment collection Synthesis 45.
Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano divorced in 1970. In 1976, Sottsass married Barbara Radice, an art critic and journalist.
When Roberto Olivetti succeeded as head of the company, he named Sottsass artistic director and offered him a high salary, but Sottsass refused. Instead, he created Studio Olivetti, independent of the company, which became a prominent international centre of design combining research with creation and industrial strategy. His concern that his creativity would be stifled by corporate work is documented in his 1973 essay When I was a Very Small Boy.
In 1968, the Royal College of Art in London granted Sottsass an honorary doctorate.
With the rise of new groups (Global Tools, Archizoom, Superstudio, UFO, Zzigurat, 9999), the handmade style emerged as a vehicle for experimentation, with many of these groups exploring this approach to renew creation. In October 1980, Sottsass received two proposals: one from Renzo Brugola, a longstanding friend and carpenter, expressing his desire "to make something together like in the good old times"; and the other from Mario and Brunella Godani, owners of the Design Gallery Milano, who asked him to create "new furniture" for their gallery.
Sottsass founded the Memphis Group in Milan on 11 December 1980, after the Bob Dylan song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" played during the group's inaugural meeting. The group was active from 1981 to 1988 and was created as a reaction against the design status quo. Sottsass centred the group's thinking around what he described as "radical, funny, and outrageous", disregarding prevailing notions of "good taste". The group drew inspiration from Art Deco, the colour palette of Pop art and kitsch themes of the 1950s. Colourful laminate and terrazzo were commonly used in their work, incorporated into floors, tables and lamps.
Sottsass also designed his own print, a squiggly pattern known as the Bacterio print. He drew inspiration from the surface texture and form of a Buddhist temple in Madurai, India, abstracting this detail into the squiggles he named Bacterio. The pattern was then applied to furniture designs as veneers and textiles.