Ettore Sottsass, 90, Italian designer with a lively touch

Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, a figurehead of 20th-century Italian design, founded the Memphis Group. (afp file/1999)

ROME - Ettore Sottsass, an Italian designer with an irreverent touch best known for creating Olivetti's iconic red, plastic typewriter, has died, officials said. He was 90.

Mr. Sottsass died Monday of heart failure at his Milan home after battling the flu, news reports said. The Culture Ministry confirmed his death.

An architect by training, Mr. Sottsass's creations for Olivetti over the course of a decades-long collaboration and an edgy style - marked by use of colorful plastic laminates and unusual shapes - established him as an innovator in postwar design.

He later formed the radical Memphis group of Italian and international designers and architects to challenge mainstream design.

"If anything will save us, it is beauty," Mr. Sottsass said, according to the ANSA news agency.

Mr. Sottsass - who designed items ranging from office equipment and lighting to ceramics, furniture, and jewelry - said he saw good design as a "way to build a metaphor for life."

"To me, design is a way to discuss life," he said, according to news reports. "It is a way to discuss society, politics, eroticism, food, even design itself."

Mr. Sottsass, an Italian, was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and studied architecture in the northern Italian city of Turin. He opened his first studio in Milan in the late 1940s.

A decade later, in 1958, he joined the design team at Olivetti, bringing color and informality to gray office environments over several decades. The iconic Valentine red portable typewriter, released in 1969, was among works that transformed office design.

With the Memphis group, which he formed in 1981, Mr. Sottsass created some of his trademark furniture, such as the Casablanca cabinet and Carlton bookcase. The group shook up the Milanese design scene, and was seen as highly influential.

Mr. Sottsass, who also designed items for Alessi and Artemide, continued to work until his death.

Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli praised him as an eclectic artist with a tirelessly creative vision.

Mayor Letizia Moratti of Milan called Mr. Sottsass a free spirit. She hailed him as "one of the voices that so deeply have marked our time."

Mr. Sottsass's work has been on display in some of the world's most prestigious museums. Currently, more than 100 works are on exhibit in the northeastern Italian city of Trieste. The retrospective runs through March 2.

"I would like them to leave crying, with an emotion, that is," Mr. Sottsass told the ANSA news agency recently.