(ANSA) - Rome,
January 2 - Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, an eternally impish guru of
the Italian cultural scene, was buried Wednesday in his adopted city Milan.
Sottsass, best remembered for Olivetti's iconic
Valentine typewriter and some bizarrely shaped furniture perhaps better seen
than sat on, died Monday at the age of 90.
"His was a talent that lasted a century. He never
ceased to amaze us right up to the last days of his life," said Culture Minister
Francesco Rutelli, recalling Sottsass's active role in setting up the last major
retrospective on his work, which runs in Trieste until March 2.
Entitled I'd Like To Know Why, it features some 300
of his works.
The Innsbruck-born designer left his mark on most of
the major design movements of the 20th century and was also an accomplished
painter, ceramicist, photographer and theorist - as well as a big-thinking
architect whose largest legacy is the futuristic 'New Malpensa' building at the
Milan airport.
In the 1980s he founded the highly influential
Memphis Group which pushed his idea of setting form over function to new
heights.
"For me, design is a way of discussing life, a way of
discussing society, politics, eroticism, food - and even design," he once wrote.
"Ultimately, it is a way of building a possible
figurative utopia, a metaphor for life".
After hooking up with the 1950s Beat Movement through
his long-time partner, the poet and translator Fernanda Pivano, Sottsass spent
much of the '60s photographing a changing America and even tried his hand at Pop
Art.
He went on to experiment with glass, copper and
ceramics - creating a line of heavyweight jewelry it took a strong-necked woman
to carry off.
But Sottsass could also bend his inspiration to
highly practical work like the first Olivetti mainframe computer and its
Synthesis office systems as well as large-scale industrial design, ideal homes
and major exhibition spaces.
His Milan studio was working on innovative private
residences right up until his death on Monday morning from heart failure.
Sottsass's works dot the world's leading museums of
design.
His fuchsia-red Valentine (1969) has pride of place
at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
