Born to an architect father in Innsbruck in 1917, Sottsass trained as an architect in Turin in the late 1930s and saw his service in the Italian army in Montenegro during the Second World War as the lost years of his life. Then, in 1945, he and his father worked on a number of projects including houses, flats and schools funded by the Marshall Plan - a task Sottsass abandoned because it was the builder, not the architect, who determined how these projects were realised. As a result of this, and encouraged by an American called Irvine Richards who assured Sottsass that the USA was yearning for Italian crafts, Sottsass designed and made small tables, lamps and ceramic vases that failed commercially but paved the way for his long association with companies such as Poltronova and Bitossi, while continuing to design interiors and exhibitions. Indeed, it was his design for Italian glass at the Milan Triennale of 1957 - a stand in which the few examples of glass were revealed among a forest of uprights covered in silver paper - that brought him to the attention of Adriano Olivetti.

Olivetti was just beginning work on its first computer - the Elea 9000, which was powered by valves - and Sottsass was given responsibility for its exterior housing. This he reduced from huge vertical cabinets to horizontal cabinets of human proportions. The computer's visual impact was reduced still further by the Elea 9001, whose transistors enabled Sottsass to lift its housing off the floor, using a modular design based on the Japanese tatami mat. Olivetti's third computer, the GE 115, built jointly with Bull in France and General Electric in the USA, employed an open-ended system that Sottsass said the Americans never fully understood.

Sottsass also designed Olivetti's first electric typewriters - the Tekne 3 and Praxis 48 - as well as the red manual Valentine, launched in 1969, that was inspired by a soft typewriter by Claus Oldenberg. Intended to have a soft, shock-absorbing exterior and be upper case only -
so to be as revolutionary to typewriters as the Biro was to fountain pens - and to cost only £10, the rising price of plastic and Olivetti's conservatism meant that in the end the Valentine had a traditional mechanism, a plastic sleeve case and cost £30. Its most revolutionary feature was its colour.

While working for Olivetti until 1980, Sottsass and his first wife, Nanda Pivano, travelled widely, and a visit to Ceylon, India, Nepal and Burma in 1960-61 led to a serious illness and a series of ceramics reflecting his near death (the Ceramics of Darkness) and his recovery (Homage to Shiva). At the same time, Sottsass designed wooden furniture, sometimes incorporating ceramic panels, for Poltronova. Then, in 1970, he designed the plastic Grey Furniture whose forms and use of integral lighting looked back to Art Deco. He was already developing ideas about sensorial design - after a break while he had a passionate affair with the Spanish artist, Eulalia Grau, recorded in his often Surrealist photographs of small, dark rooms and vast, empty spaces - he returned to exploring new ways of designing furniture, light fittings, glass and even silverware through Alchymia and Memphis. Following his belief that the American diner is one of the unsung delights of design, Memphis furniture in particular used patterned laminates along with expensive materials like marble to create cabinets, bookcases, tables and chairs whose shapes were often angular and geometrical, and whose colours were strong and vibrant. Talking to me in 1999, Sottsass admitted that perhaps he had launched a revolution that has now got out of control.

By the late 1980s, Memphis had ended and Sottsass had established Sottsass Associati, building houses in Italy, Belgium, America, Hawaii, Singapore and Japan that are notable for their strong, geometrical forms, equally strong colours and occasional monumentality. There were also interiors for the Esprit chain of shops in Germany and Switzerland, and for Malpensa Airport outside Milan. In addition, Sottsass designed cutlery, condiment sets and other items for Alessi. He also worked for manufacturers of electronic equipment, light fittings, furniture and kitchen utensils, while he continued designing one-off pieces of furniture that, arguably, echo his design thinking of the 1980s. Sottsass' impact on design has been as important as Picasso's impact on painting in the 20th century and, like Picasso, Sottsass was a master of many different media.

Richard Carr first met Ettore Sottsass in the mid-1960s. Their last conversations in Milan are recorded in Carr's monograph, With Sottsass - Catching Up.

Richard Carr