Ettore Sottsass

Designer, architect and aspiring painter, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) treasured 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 '50s, his love for painting led him to integrate colour into his furnishings through coloured metals, stripes, squares, combination of black and white and strong shades. 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 reached its peak when he founded the Memphis Group in 1981, a movement which divulgated the pop aesthetic that distinguishes his most famous furniture.

Designer items

Meet the designers

Gio Ponti

Piero Fornasetti

Fratelli Castiglioni

Joe Colombo

Nanda Vigo

Ettore Sottsass

Marco Zanuso

Luigi Caccia Dominioni

Ico Parisi

Charles & Ray Eames

Gae Aulenti

Pietro Chiesa

Vico Magistretti

Giotto Stoppino

Tobia Scarpa

Carlo Nason

Marcello Cuneo

Vittorio Dassi

Paolo Buffa

Max Ingrand

Gastone Rinaldi

Pia Guidetti Crippa

Gaetano Pesce

Richard Sapper

Ingo Maurer

Gabriella Crespi

Paul McCobb

Paul Tuttle

Nendo

Alvaro Siza

Carl Jacob Jucker

Ernesto Basile

Sergio Mazza

Osvaldo Borsani

Oscar Torlasco

Le Corbusier

Willy Rizzo

Gaetano Sciolari

Carlo De Carli

Angelo Lelli

Gino Sarfatti

Marcel Breuer

Carlo Scarpa

Massimo & Lella Vignelli

Claudio Salocchi

Toni Zuccheri

Aldo Tura

Verner Panton

Giancarlo Piretti

Gianfranco Frattini

Guglielmo Ulrich

Franco Albini

Philippe Starck

Angelo Mangiarotti

Enzo Mari

Tito Agnoli

Kazuide Takahama

Eero Saarinen

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Carlo Ratti

Alessandro Mendini

Mario Bellini

Cleto Munari

Carlo Mollino

Bruno Munari

Hans J. Wegner

Studio BBPR

Giovanni Michelucci

Norman Foster