Whw was Ettore Sottsass?
Get ready to meet one of the most unpredictable, ironic, and influential figures in twentieth-century design.
Sottsass wasn’t just a designer. He was a cultural provocateur, a man who used color like a weapon and form like a punchline.

He lived almost an entire century, constantly changing his mind whenever the world gave him a new reason to. For him, design wasn’t just about making things functional, but about giving them meaning. Or, as he once said: “When you don’t know what to do, you do design.”

Ettore Sottsass was born in Innsbruck in 1917, the son of a rationalist architect. He grew up inside the rigid world of architecture, then spent his life tearing it apart with irony. After the war, he began working for Olivetti, and there he became a legend.

Here are some little-known stories about him:

The typewriter that hated offices
When he designed the Valentine for Olivetti in 1969, he said he didn’t want to create a “typewriter,” but something you could use on the sofa or at a café. He wanted people to stop associating work with boredom. “The Valentine,” he said, “isn’t made for offices, but for love affairs.”

The trip that changed his eyes (and his palette)
In 1961 he traveled to India and came back transformed. He said he had seen “a world where even poverty was colorful.” From that point on, his work exploded with reds, turquoise, and greens that looked as if they’d come straight from a Hindu temple. That experience made him reject the cold, functional idea of Western design.

The night Memphis was born
In 1981, during a meeting at his home in Milan, someone put on a Bob Dylan record. The song was “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” As the record played, someone suggested the word “Memphis” as the name for their new design collective. That’s how Memphis was born: a group determined to break every rule of good taste.

The designer who didn’t like design
Sottsass often mocked his own profession. In one interview he said, “I’m not interested in making beautiful things. I’m interested in making things that talk about life, about eroticism, about death.” He had a rare gift for saying uncomfortable truths while making you smile.

Olivetti and the poetry of machines
In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a consultant for Olivetti. He didn’t just design objects; he wrote texts for brochures and took photographs to understand “how a machine lives in the world.” For him, even a calculator or computer had a soul. He believed that the most technical objects should still move people emotionally.

The secret photographer
Few know that Sottsass was obsessed with photography. In twelve days in South America, he took nearly two thousand pictures. He photographed peeling walls, signs, temples, and anything that told an untold story. Many of those images are now kept at the Centre Pompidou.

The irony of not taking himself too seriously
When a critic once asked him if his design was “postmodern,” he replied, “Postmodern? Maybe. But I don’t even know what modern means.” It was his way of saying that design, like life, should never be taken too seriously.

Sottsass left behind iconic works such as:
— Superbox (1966): a vertical striped cabinet that looks more like a totem than a piece of furniture.
— Carlton Bookcase (1981): a zigzag bookshelf, a manifesto against functionality.
— Valentine (1969): bright red, light, and portable. A pop typewriter that still fascinates today.
But more than objects, he left behind an idea: design can be a way of telling life’s story, with irony, passion, and disorder.

If you want to understand his spirit, read Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things by Deyan Sudjic (Phaidon, 2015) or Ettore Sottsass by Philippe Thome (Phaidon, 2014).
And if you ever walk by his old studio in Via Pontaccio, Milan, take a look at the window. It still feels like he might step out any moment—smiling, wearing a colorful shirt, ready with a new idea to destroy “serious” design.

Want to really understand Sottsass?
Look at one of his objects and ask yourself: “Does this make me smile?”
If yes, then you’ve got it.