conomic activity. . . design has become the key to the new material world that can support fifty times fifty men. Design is the interdenominational networking of form that makes sense of consumption.
Ettore Sottsass is seen as a product of the upheavals and realities of this century. His national and geographical origins were determined by the changes wrought in World War I and the direction of his career as a designer was defined by the economic and political legacy of World War II. He moved to America in the 1950s, seeing in it the contemporary mecca of industrial and consumer production and progress. In the 1960s, Sottsass went to India along with much of the counter-culture and was closely associated with Pop Art and the Beat Generation. In the 1970s he was a leading figure in the Radical Design movement. In the 1980s Sottsass was involved in projects and products from Hindu poetry to houses. All his efforts have given form to years of research and discussion about the nature of environmental design. Sottsass himself states that there is a fundamental political basis for existence. His father was a passionate political and patriotic citizen who was always aware of his own "political substance" and who conveyed this idea to his son. Sottsass means more by politics than a narrow definition such as we might give it in referring to government:
By politics, he does not mean the narrow allegiances represented by party tickets but the surroundings, physical, social, and economic, that define people's everyday lives. An awareness of how we are pushed and conditioned by these surroundings and the realization that human situations are largely determined by political conditions is essential, he thinks, to real participation in "the profession that is life."
This belief infuses all of Sottsass's design work, which has always tried to draw the attention of the public to the political forces shaping human lives, however in...