Designer Ettore Sottsass died yesterday, at 90. The leader of a group of Italian designers who called themselves Memphis, he helped spark the postmodern design revolution, which mixed pure modernism with color and pattern, historic references and unabashed pastiche.
But before Memphis, with its focus on objects for the home, Sottsass was known as a designer of technology. His little red typewriter for Olivetti is an icon in its own right, and he designed Olivetti’s elegant mainframe computer, the Elea 9003 (pictured here), back in 1959.
[Via: TED | TEDBlog]