Canada Armchair in Velvet by Ettore Sottsass for Poltronova, 1950s

Canada settee armchair with a structure in wood, seat and back in padded blue-green velvet.
It was designed by Ettore Sottsass Jr in 1959 and produced by the Italian company Poltronova during the 1960s.

Licterature: P. C. Santini, Facendo mobili con, Poltronova Edizioni, Firenze, 1977, p. 87.

In the 1960s, in a region such as Tuscany which produced literally nothing in the field of design, Poltronova had all the best on its team: not just Ettore Sottsass, who was its art director, but Gae Aulenti, Paolo Portoghesi, Giovanni Michelucci, Angelo Mangiarotti, the Archizoom and Superstudio groups, De Pas-D’Urbino-Lomazzi; not just the mentors, but also the leading exponents of New Design who were then called radicals… Moving away from Dino Gavina and the Danish aristocracy, who in the early ’60s created the first niche of top quality brands, right from the start Sergio Cammilli adopted a different, experimental method, bringing together the polycentric soul of Italian design and its contradictions and opposing trends. He was convinced –and today we see he was right– that this complexity was the very source of the unity and vitality of this extraordinary phenomenon. Cammilli immediately put together, in the same catalog, Archizoom’s anarchic works and Angelo Mangiarotti’s Cub8 (the first Italian “equipped wall”), the postmodern experiments by Paolo Portoghesi and Ettore Sottsass’s irreverent archetypes.

(Courtesy of Poltonova).