Obituary - Ettore Sottsass

Discussions of Dylan and eating cats are amoung Deyan Sudjic's memories of Ettore Sottsass.

Ettore Sottsass, who died on 31 December 2007, never saw the exhibition that London's Design Museum staged last year to celebrate his 90th birthday. His back was playing up, so he couldn't fly.
He did design it though, on the table in his living room in Milan. And an effortlessly brilliant job he made of it too. The first idea was to do something simple; just one object chosen carefully from each of the seven decades of his working life.
A plain aluminium lampshade from the 1940s; Italy's first mainframe computer from the 1950s; the famous lipstick red plastic Valentine portable typewriter from the 1960s. But of course as soon as we got started on the exhibition, it obviously wasn't going to work. How could you possibly treat the career of the greatest Italian designer of the last half century like that?
Before I knew it, the show had taken over the whole top floor of the museum, and we were tearing out glass cases to make more room.We talked about how Adriano Olivetti had come to hire him for that computer; about his days in Mussolini's army in Yugoslavia; and about the Dylan track that
kept playing in the background the night in the 1980s when he came up with Memphis as the name for his onslaught on conventional good taste with a wave of baby colours and eccentric patterned laminates.
He didn't turn a hair when I told him about my grandmother's memories of the mysterious disappearance of every cat in her Montenegrin village when the Italian soldiers billeted on her got hungry. But he didn't take too kindly to my rash attempt to wield a pencil on his exhibition layout. I'd seen him on and off over the years ever since the Memphis launch party in 1981, where for some reason he was wearing two ties. We once spent a memorable weekend with Helmut Newton in an extraordinary house that he had built around a vast aviary that Newton was photographing.
But the trips to Milan to organise the show were different. He really wanted to talk, and I had the chance to spend an afternoon in his filing cabinet, picking out a succession of photographs that charted the passage of time on his face, from a schoolboy in a sailor suit in the 1920s, to a Riviera playboy in a sharp suit in the 1950s, to a hippy in the 1960s. At 90 he was still a gravely elegant figure
in his carefully knotted pigtail. He was a gifted draughtsman, a constantly inventive designer and architect, and beyond that, he was a rare designer who understood something about life.