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01 January 2008
Ettore Sottsass, 1917-2007
Designer Ettore Sottsass died yesterday, at 90. The leader of a group of Italian designers who called themselves Memphis, he helped spark the postmodern design revolution, which mixed pure modernism with color and pattern, historic references and unabashed pastiche. Now-classic Memphis pieces such as his Carlton room divider rocked the design world in the early 1980s, and continue to inspire designers today (a burned Carlton divider appeared in the 2004 show "Where There's Smoke" at Moss).
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But before Memphis, with its focus on objects for the home, Sottsass was known as a designer of technology. His little red typewriter for Olivetti is an icon in its own right, and he designed Olivetti's elegant mainframe computer, the Elea 9003 (pictured here), back in 1959.
Many recent exhibits have celebrated Sottsass' career, among them an 88th-birthday retrospective at LACMA, a 90th-birthday show last summer at London's Design Museum, and a show open now in his hometown of Turin.
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