Coffee Table Ettore Sottsass

Ettore Sottsass was an italian architect and designer of the late 20th century. His body of designs included furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting and office machine design.

In 1956, Ettore Sottsass began working as a design consultant for Olivetti, designing office equipment, typewriters, and furniture. There Sottsass made his name as a designer who, through colour, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realm of popular culture. Sottsass, Mario Tchou, and Roberto olivetti won the prestigious 1960 compasso d’oro with the elea 9003, the first italian mainframe computer.

Throughout the 1960s, Sottsass travelled in the US and India and designed more products for Olivetti, culminating in the bright red plastic portable valentine typewriter in 1970, which became a fashion accessory. Sotsass described the valentine as “a brio among typewriters.” compared with the typical drab typewriters of the day, the valentine was more of a design statement item than an office machine.

While continuing to design for Olivetti in the 1960s, Sottsass developed a range of objects which were expressions of his personal experiences traveling in the United States and India. These objects included large altar-like ceramic sculptures and his “superboxes”, radical sculptural gestures presented within a context of consumer product, as conceptual statement. Covered in bold and colorful, simulated custom laminates, they were precursors to memphis, a movement which came more than a decade later. His work from the late 60s to the 70s was defined by experimental collaborations with younger designers such as Superstudio and Archizoom association, and association with the radical movement, culminating in the foundation of Memphis at the turn of the decade.

As an industrial designer, his clients included Fiorucci, esprit, the Italian furniture company Poltronova, Knoll international, Serafino Zani, Alessi and Brondi. As an architect, he designed the Mayer-Schwarz gallery on rodeo drive in Beverly hills, California, with its dramatic doorway made of irregular folds and jagged angles, and the home of David M. Kelley, designer of apple’s first computer mouse, in woodside, California. In the mid-1990s, he designed the sculpture garden and entry gates of the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg gallery at the campus of Cal Poly Pomona. He collaborated with well-known figures in the architecture and design field, including Aldo Cibic, James Irvine, Matteo Thun.

Sottsass had a vast body of work; furniture, jewellery, ceramics, glass, silver work, lighting, office machine design and buildings which inspired generations of architects and designers.