Ettore Sottsass and the poetry of things
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 314660370
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Phaidon
- ISBN
- 9780714869537
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The book is the first serious study on Sottsass to be published since Dr Penny Sparke’s book of 1982. It is based on conversations with Sottsass between 1981 and 2007, including an exhibition Sudjic curated at the Design Museum (Ettore Sottsass, Work in Progress, 29 March- 10 June 2007), and a period of prolonged research including at the Centro Studi e Archive della Comunicazione at the University of Parma. There Sudjic found the note Sottsass wrote to himself in 1959 while designing Italy’s first computer, asking ‘What should a computer look like?’ and answering: ‘not like a washing machine’. Sudjic had access to Sottsass’s personal archive, which included the complete record of his correspondence with his parents since student days, the account of seeing Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 Paris Expo, and his letters as a prisoner of war, then a volunteer in Mussolini’s Republica Sociale Italiana army, an episode of which Sottsass had never spoke in public. These letters form the basis for the detailed account of Sottsass’s life during the war years.
The leading survivors of Italian design of his era, Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Enzo Mari, and Mario Bellini were interviewed, as well as designers he worked with, from Nathalie du Pasquier, to David Kelley of IDEO, and his clients: Alberto Alessi, Jean Pigozzi, Doug Tompkins of the Esprit fashion brand, and Sottsass’s widow, Barbara Radice. Subsequently, Sudjic contributed to the catalogue for the Plastic Fields exhibition on Memphis at the Palazzo Franchetti,in Venice in 2018, and Sotheby’s catalogue for its David Bowie sale, 2016.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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