APCOM

Besides the top fashion designer Gianfranco Ferrè, who died on June the 17th, on the last day of the year, Milan mourned another of its most valuable and famous creative talents: Ettore Sottsass. "In the event something does save us, it will be beauty" was one of the mottos of the eclectic maestro of Italian design, born in Innsbruck, Austria, 90 years ago. Rather than concentrating on the functionality of his work of art, Sottsass emphasized the emotions these elicited. For over 60 years Milan was the workshop of his creativity and some of his works of art, like the flower vase Shiva, are on exhibition at the New Triennale Design Museum: an exhibit space which was projected by his pupil, Michele de Lucchi, in the same building planned by his master, Giovanni Muzio.

With a bachelor in architecture at the Turin polytechnic in 1939, Sottsass - married to writer and most well known translator of the Us beat generation novelists - was also an urban planner, a painter and a photographer. He started his activity in Milan in 1947 when he opened his first studio. Towards the end of the 1950s he started collaborating with Olivetti and he designed the calculator Logos 27 (1963), the typewriters Praxis 48 (1964), the Valentina (with Perry King), the Syntehesis office system (1973), the mainframe Elea 9003. The latter project enabled him to win the "Compasso d'oro", the design Nobel Prize. He also planned the inside terminals of the Malpensa airport.

His artistic, ethical and existential research led him to build ties with Rationalism, the Concrete Art Movement, Spacialism, Pop culture. During the 1980s he founded the Memphis group with de Lucchi, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Andrea Branzi. "To me - he once said - design is a means to talk about life. It's a way to talk about the society, politics, eroticism, food and even design. In addition, it's a way to build a possible figurative utopia or to build a metaphor of life".

"Not only - has commented the Mayor of Milan Letizia Moratti - has Ettore Sottsass been one of the most eclectic and avant guard representatives of the Italian and international design, but he has also been the main protagonist of those cultural moments that characterized the whole of the 20th century".