Ettore Sottsass

Sottsass was born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1917, according to the Design Museum.¹ His parents moved to Turin in 1929 because the city had the best architecture faculty in Italy, as the Design Museum recounts.¹ He was educated in Turin from 1928 to 1934 and studied architecture at the Polytechnic there from 1935 to 1939.⁴

According to ULAN Full Record Display (Getty Research), the 1928 start of his Turin education in ULAN and the 1929 family move in the Design Museum account are not reconciled by the pack.^1,4 He practiced architecture privately in Milan from 1946 and worked there as an industrial designer from 1958.⁴ During the following decade, he also curated, painted, wrote for Domus magazine, designed stage sets, and established an architecture and industrial design practice, according to the Design Museum.¹

Sottsass worked for Olivetti alongside Roberto Olivetti, as the Design Museum recounts.¹ With Perry King, he designed the Valentine typewriter for Olivetti; the V&A records it as made in Spain around 1969 and notes that it entered production that year.⁵ According to Design Museum, in the mid-1960s he developed striped plastic-laminate Superbox closets for Poltronova.¹ His work also included glass and ceramics; a ceramics publication describes his ceramic objects as both decorative and functional.^1,3

Sottsass founded the Memphis design group in Milan in 1980.^1,2 A publisher description identifies him as a founder of the Milan-based collaborative in the early 1980s and characterizes his work as a harbinger of postmodern design.² The Design Museum describes Sottsass as a pivotal figure in late-20th-century Italian design and as an eclectic architect and industrial designer.¹ The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a survey of his work in 2006, and a retrospective was mounted in Trieste in late 2007; his work was the focus of multiple exhibitions and retrospectives during the 2000s.^1,4