Ettore Sotsass

After a year during which cultural and artistic giants like Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean Baudrillard 2008 starts with news of another loss.

Designer Ettore Sottsass (Italian, born Austria, 1917) 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. Now-classic Memphis pieces such as his Carlton room divider rocked the design world in the early 1980s, and continue to inspire designers today. (re-posted from TED Blog)