Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, the figurehead of 20th-century Italian design died on Monday aged 90, the ANSA news agency reported.

His rich longevity and sensitive soul brought him to cross many designs periods. In 1958 Sottsass worked as an industrial designer for ‘Olivetti’. He designed a variety of products such as calculators and typewriters. Some of these products, such as the Logos 27 calculator and the Valentine typewriter were very well known products at the time. His greatest accomplishment whilst at ‘Olivetti’ was the design of the mainframe computer ‘Elea 9003′ for which he given the coveted Compasso d’Oro award. Sottsass’s influential designs helped launch Olivetti into the world of Italian industrial design.

In 1972 Sottsass created a ”House Environment” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The room consisted of a series of grey fibreglass containers comprising of such things as cookers, sinks, dishwashers, showers, toilets, storage, seating, beds and wardrobes.

Ettore Sottsass was one of the leading members of the Memphis Group founded in 1981 to revive Radical Design. The products created by the Memphis group included limited production creations of unusual objects and functional designs to break down the barriers between high class and low class.

A retrospective of the designer’s work was opened in northeastern Trieste in early December marking his 90th birthday on September 14.

The exhibition, titled “I Want to Know Why,” includes 130 of Sottsass’s creations and runs until March 2.

“I would like the visitors to leave crying — that is, with emotion,” he said at the time of the opening. And he left left us to look at objects with wise words.