Electa, with the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, publishes a new project proposed by Barbara Radice for the centenary of Ettore Sottsass' birth and ten years after his death (Innsbruck 1917-Milan 2007). Sottsass worked on the There is a Planet project in collaboration with Nanae Umeda for the German publisher Wasmuth in the 1990s.
It features photographs taken in 40 years of his travels around the world, focused on living and the human presence on the planet in general. There are pictures of uncontaminated nature (views of rivers, forests, sea expanses, rocks and strongly aesthetic features studied close-up, from Algeria to Polynesia, the Caribbean and his beloved Eolie islands) as well as architecture, houses, people and unusual, profoundly human situations. All are grouped by theme and introduced with sketches and comments on life. The Sottsass project – which gathered these pictures in five groups, under five different titles and with as many texts – remained unfinished and the book was never published. Conceived by the great master, There is a Planet is now being reproposed, convinced as we are that it provides readers with important insight into the original and radical angle from which Ettore Sottsass viewed the world.