Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Born in 1917, Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass is today best known as the founder in the early 1980s of Memphis, the Milan-based design collaborative. As a harbinger of Postmodern design, Memphis - and soon Sottsass himself - became the subject of widespread public attention. As this book demonstrates, however, Sottsass has been a pioneer of worldwide significance in all major fields of design - furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, architecture and industrial design - throughout his sixty-five-year career, during which he has collaborated with many of the world's best-known manufacturers, Alessi, Olivetti and Sevres among them.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Sponsor's Statement (p. 7)
• Foreword (p. 7)
• Preface (p. 8)
• Ettore Sottsass, a Modern Italian Designer (p. 11)
• Humanist for the Modern Age (p. 33)
• Catalysts of Perception: Material Considerations (p. 55)
• Imagining Utopia: The Figurative Universe of Ettore Sottsass (p. 73)
• Instruments for Life: Conversations with Ettore Sottsass (p. 103)
• Maker Biographies and Company Profiles (p. 125)
• Chronology (p. 143)
• Suggested Reading (p. 154)
• Picture Credits (p. 155)
• Acknowledgments (p. 156)
• Contributors (p. 157)
• Index (p. 158)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Produced to coincide with a retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), this catalog reviews Italian architect and designer Sottsass's distinguished 65-year career. Best known in the United States as the designer of Olivetti's Valentine typewriter and for his role in the Milan-based design cooperative Memphis, which he founded in the 1980s, Sottsass is today regarded as a progenitor of postmodern design. Labaco (assistant curator of decorative arts, LACMA) covers Sottsass's entire output in various media and includes an extensive interview with the designer as well as detailed profiles of the companies for which he has worked and of his many collaborators. Lacking a catalog checklist and shorter than the most recent English-language exhibition catalog on the designer-Ettore Sottsass: The Architecture and Design of Sottsass Associates, which emphasizes his work after 1980-Labaco's book is valuable for its comprehensiveness. With 150 illustrations, most of them in color, it is recommended for architecture and design collections at all levels.-Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.