The importance of being Ettore Sottsass

“Design should also be sensual and exciting.”

“The artists who were pioneering the modern movement in the visual arts looked widely for inspiration, breaking away from the old hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ that had long divided visual culture into fine art and decorative art,” said business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk. 

Sottsass developed a series of iconic objects that transcended their physical characteristics: They were full of symbolism, global and historical references, and had the ability to appeal to their users’ emotions.

There are lot of different ways to define great design, but this display of obsessive care over the things that “no-one asked for” is probably my favourite. More than a little neurotic and almost never making financial sense, this desire to go further than required has always seemed to me so noble, a pure expression of the deferred love contained w... See more

For Sottsass, designing was a more complex endeavor than just building a house or creating a new consumer object—it was about achieving a deeper connection to the world around us. “Ettore thought that design should help people become more aware of their existence: the space they live in, how to arrange it and their own presence in it,