Sottsass was born on 14 September 1917 in Innsbruck, Austria, and grew up in Milan, where his father was an architect.
He was educated at the Politecnico di Torino in Turin and graduated in 1939 with a degree in architecture. He served in the Italian military and spent much of World War II in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. After returning home in 1947, he set up his own architectural and industrial design studio in Milan.
Sottsass was continually driven by a personal search for a new language of modern design. His rigorous pursuits led to the creation of such groundbreaking movements as radical design, anti-design, post-modernist architecture, and the founding of Memphis in the early 1980s.
Sottsass' remarkable career produced a diverse array of commissions that transformed architecture and design. Iconic built architectural works include Wolf House (1989) in Colorado and Milan's Malpensa Airport (2000). Objects he designed for Alessi and products for Olivetti, including his iconic Valentine typewriter, have changed the landscape of industrial design. The Memphis movement, for which he is most popularly known, set the style for an entire decade.
Sottsass’s career has recently been the object of major retrospective exhibitions: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006, the London Design Museum in 2007, and the Ghent Museum of Art. In addition, his works belong to the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.