minimum design

Alessandro

Mendini

24 ORE Cultura

minimum design

Series directed by
Andrea Branzi

Alessandro

MENDINI
Graziella Leyla Ciag

24 ORE Cultura

Cover
Proust armchair, 1978
Atelier Mendini, Milan

Published by
24 ORE Cultura srl
Editorial Director
Natalina Costa
Head of planning
Balthazar Pagani
Project Editor
Chiara Savino
Picture Research
Alessandra Murolo
Head of Technical and Graphic
Maurizio Bartomioli
Graphic design
Irma Robbiati
page layout
Gianluca Turturo
Photolithography
Valter Montani
Editorial Assistant
Giorgia Montagna
With the contribution of
Consultant Fund Raising
Coordination
Chiara Giudice

minimum design
Titles in the series
Franco Albini
Achille and Pier Giacomo
Castiglioni
Joe Colombo
Tom Dixon
Gio Ponti
Ettore Sottsass
Ron Arad
Jasper Morrison
Philippe Starck
Forthcoming titles
Alvar Aalto
Gae Aulenti
Mario Bellini
Andrea Branzi
Antonio Citterio
Michele De Lucchi
Stefano Giovannoni
Konstantin Grcic
Vico Magistretti
Angelo Mangiarotti
Enzo Mari
Carlo Mollino
Eero Saarinen
Marco Zanuso

Consultant Fund Raising

Anna Mainoli
Picture Research and Editing
Silvia Russo
Editing
Arianna Bassi
English translation
Sylvia Adrian Notini

2011 24 ORE Cultura srl, Pero (Milan), Italy

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form.
First edition: November 2011
ISBN 978-88-6648-028-0
Printed in Italy

Special thanks to
Beatrice Felis of Atelier Mendini, Milan

 Alessandro Mendini
4
Andrea Branzi

C
O
N
T
E
N
T
S

22

The Poetics of Mendini

34

Catalogue of Objects

36

The Objects

104

A New Utopia

112

The Useful Art

118

Selected References

Alessandro Mendini
Andrea Branzi

Alessandro Mendini must be understood as the

most direct heir to an original Italian syndrome whose
historical origins lie in the contradictions and the
malaise of early modernity; the heir, therefore, of a
strategic line that is wholly original in respect to
European Rationalism.
Italys delay in the early phases of the Industrial
Revolution has weighed greatly on our culture of
the project, and especially on the engendering in
this country of an idea of modernity that is much
more theoretical than practical. At the start of the
twentieth century, the process of renewal that no
doubt was struggling to take off was accelerated
by the artists, who prophesized much before it
actually took place as Italian society was still largely
under the influence of the era of King Umberto I an
anthropological mutation that would be induced
by the industries and by speed.
Yet the Italian avant-gardes were aware of a sort of
void that existed behind their backs, and in some
ways continued to nurture an unspoken doubt as
to the capacity of industrialization to achieve real
progress.The Futurists believed that modernity would
not produce as to some extent did occur a new
civilization and new values, but only a sort of Citt
che sale (The City Rises), the title Umberto Boccioni
gave one of his paintings, hence, endless and without
an end. With Metaphysics, modernity felt stuck
between a probable failure of the future and the
certain failure of the past, as it statically contemplated
a meaningless present.
At the same time, the Negative Thinking of the great
intellectuals of the finis Austriae already foreshadowed
a very complex future; Robert Musil, for instance,
spoke of the advent of a Man without Qualities,
Oscar Spengler theorized the Decline of the West,

and Ludwig Hilberseimer portrayed the grey,

anonymous and inhospitable scenarios of the
industrial city.
The first Italian design to be produced in the interwar
period, which was not preceded by an adequate
reformist debate and in the absence of an
enlightened society, developed a unique idea
(the only one in Europe) of a modernity of
the surface, a decorative, scenographic
sort of modernity that, while not

dealing with a structural reform of the domestic

world, brought about a change in what we might
call its skin, just as Giacomo Balla and Fortunato
Depero did in their work by introducing environmental
signs and narratives for a Pirandellian comedy that
went under the name of modernity.Theirs was not,
like that of Vienna, a tragic vision, but rather a precise
interpretation of a better future freed from serious
humanistic responsibilities and the weight of history,
but in any case fragile in its underlying values. It was
precisely from this type of strategy that Alessandro
Mendinis projects were born, that is, from a modernity
of the surfaces. A non-enlightened modernity but
not even a conservative one, intimist but not indifferent,
which changed the meaning of reality without
touching its deep structures. Mendinis work as a
consultant for Alessi and Swatch quite clearly
highlighted this idea of objects that, through
colour, decoration and new languages,
took on a different role and became
a gift, collectors objects.Without
altering their function,

Mendini enacted a mutation in their identity: from

banal objects to the protagonists of social rites and
new markets. The Proust armchair, thanks to its
nineteenth-century upholstery featuring a unique
decor, has become the assertion of a possible
alternative to structural modernity, faced with the
diffusive efficacy of its media icon.
Contemporary design finds itself face-to face-with
two different territorial options: the first of these is
represented by the real market, where projects exist,
to become goods that are bought and used, while
the second of these is represented by the media
territory, where the objects may even not exist
physically, as their virtual image alone influences
taste, the visual culture and therefore the world of
ideas. Mendini moves about in a territory that is
somewhere in between, where objects are in part
real and in part virtual; his great experience in the
sector of design publishing (twice director of Domus,
Casabella and MODO) is not collateral to his work
as a designer; rather, it is an integral part of it,
because it represents the media side, where images,
information and criticism can actually transform
social culture itself.
Italy, which has always had a problematic idea of
modernity (as we have seen), thinking of it as more
of a hypothetical reality than a real one, is the country
where design and architecture periodicals have
had a unique circulation and role in the world:
Domus, Casabella, Interni, Abitare and many others
like them have never just been the titles of a trade
sector on whose pages only professional issues are
debated; rather, they have played a much broader
social role.They have allowed ideas and knowledge
to circulate, they have modified not only taste but
also, indirectly, the customs of a country. It is no
coincidence if a country like Italy, where modernity
has never been fully implemented and where the
structural reforms that should be a part of it have
never occurred, has for a long time been considered
the home of a new modernity. Milan is recognized
as being the world capital of design and of the
Made in Italy brand, a reality that is in part based
on products and in part based on media ...

Interno di un interno,
a collection of furniture
and objects, drawing, 1991

Personally speaking, its not

the project that interests me:
I use project-related reality
not in coherence with its aim,
but so that I can carry out
my natural vital act,
which is to produce images.
Auto-presentazione, 1987

p. 7
Alessandro Mendini
and Mobili per Uomo, Bisazza

Proust armchair, miniature

in gilt copper, Short Stories, 2004
Monumentino da Casa, miniature
in gilt brass, Short Stories, 2004
pp. 10-11
Kandissi sofa, miniature
in gilt brass, Short Stories, 2004

10

11

12

Anna toile, corkscrew, jewelry

version, limited edition, project
with Young Hee Cha, Alessi, 2010

13

14

Furniture to be worn, performance for Fiorucci

Milano, project with Alchimia, 1982

Costume for Donna and Arpa, project with Lidia Prandi,

Ines Flok and Davide Mosconi, performance, 1976

15

Cosmesi Universale,
drawings, 1987

Citt Gentile, Corian sculptures,

project with Bruno Gregori,
drawings, 2004

Atelier Mendini Milan, Alessandro

and Francesco Mendinis studio,
opened in 1989

18

19

Euclide, Mamoli
Rubinetterie, 2006
Aurora, Olivari, 1994

20

21

The poetics
of Alessandro
Mendini

22

Eastern gorilla, photomontage

for the cover of Casabella,
no. 367, 1972

In 1970, in a Milan still shaken by the protests

of 1968, Alessandro Mendini left behind him the
professional activity he had experienced at Studio
Nizzoli and took over the running of the periodical
Casabella, which he would soon turn into the very
heart of the documentation, development and
dissemination of the neo-avant-garde of Italian
Design. The most significant juncture in this process
was, in 1972, the periodicals participation in the
prestigious exhibition organized at the MoMA in
New York called Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, which staged, with the skilful directing of
Emilio Ambasz, the proposals and the provocations
of all the groups belonging to this trend, or their
friendly travel companions (Archizoom, Superstudio, UFO, Strum, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce,
etc.), brought together by the idea of wanting to
put aside the stereotypical image of Italy as the
Bel Paese of Good Design.
On the cover of issue no. 367 of Casabella dedicated to that American exhibition, Mendini made
his first demonstrative act by publishing the image of a gorilla taken from a postcard from the
Museum of Natural History in New York, which he
had bought at the MoMA. Mendini modified the
image by adding the words radical design to the
animals chest and, with an act of re-signification
in Dadaist style (like Marcel Duchamps moustachioed Mona Lisa), portrayed the new Italian
avant-garde christened radical by Germano
Celant with the belligerent look of a gorilla: the
symbol of primitive man who roams around the
world in search of new paths, in opposition to
technological man who, reassured by the myth
of progress, moves, in total darkness, along a
motorway with a guaranteed toll-gate and lit
up by many neon lights. In the ideological context of the early 1970s, strongly critical towards
consumer society and largely imbued with the
mood of the libidinous aesthetics of Marcuses
Eros and Civilization, Mendini matured his own vision of the world with a project approach that was
at once literary and iconographic, which turned

his desecrating use of images, accompanied

by recourse to a writing technique similar to the
aphorism, into an instrument that sharply criticized
Rationalism, Functionalism, and technologism that
had no real goal if not that of industry. The gorilla
cover indeed inaugurated a successful series in
which some images of objects (photographs or
drawings) were shown on a full-page spread using the techniques of the paradox, the grotesque
and the performance transferred from the
language of the early twentieth-century artistic
avant-gardes so as to instrumentally express
certain concepts and thoughts that adhered to
the meaning of their being in the world and not
to their mere practical functionality or aesthetic
intentionality.
Mendini called them objects for spiritual use:
some were drawn in a sketched out manner
as though they were proto-forms; others were
built to be destroyed straight afterwards (this
was the case of the Lass chair); others still had

23

Sedia Terra, Bracciodiferro

for Cassina, 1975

unlikely sizes and forms (like the Scivolavo chair),

or else were built with materials that made their
use impossible (Valigia for the final journey, the
Bauhaus-style lamp) or limited in time (the Straw
armchair). They were all self-built objects (almost all one-of-a-kind) that unhinge the usual
rationale attributed to their function; they were
meant to oppose the most attractive high-level
serially produced objects, they were made for an
elementary survival, and they took on the meaning of places where to perform eternal thoughts,
where one can be conscious from one hour to
the next of ones own condition as someone who
is alive. In respect to the aridity and the rhetoric
of Functionalism they staked a claim of spirituality
that deliberately transcended any realistic reference to production and consumption. The chair

24

ironically named Lass (a chair hard to have

access to) was a small domestic monument, a
throne that once conquered (its not easy to sit on!)
offered anyone the chance to be a protagonist,
transforming ones own home into a stage or a
cabinet of curiosities. On the cover of Casabella
(no. 391, 1974) the chair is pictured at the moment
of its destruction among the flames, stimulating
thought, which acquires renewed actuality today,
on the mortal destiny of objects, similar to that
of people, whose place in life is soon occupied
by other presences. In Sedia Terra, real particles
of soil were stowed away inside a stereometric
form made of Plexiglass, thus making the most
primitive material that exists inaccessible and
precious, so as to turn ones attention to the alienated relationship between man and nature

in a world that is increasingly projected towards

the utmost artificiality. The chair was no longer a
functional object but instead became a reliquary
of a lost thing: Residues similar to the earth
could be flowers, grass, ash, food, manure. The
use of residues, heaps, waste products of things
and memories of ones life to organize ones own
liveable surroundings is a healthy way to expand
in the environment inside oneself (Casabella,
no. 390, 1974).
Mendinis objects for spiritual use sounded out
new experiences, they were food for thought
and raised questions. Medini himself wondered:
Where do we look for outlets? Inside or outside the
discipline of design? A first answer to this crucial
question was the creation in 1974 of Global Tools,
an alternative school promoted by the periodical
Casabella itself, which saw the participation, apart
from Mendini, of the groups Archizoom, UFO and
Superstudio, and again Gaetano Pesce, Ettore
Sottsass, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena. The aim
was to cast doubt over the role of the architect
and the designer as technicians at the service of
the economic system, and to elaborate an idea
of the anti-specialist and the anti-disciplinary
project, fuelled by the introduction of different
points of view, perhaps even extraneous to the
tradition of architecture.
The road that was singled out was that of the
recovery of manual work, setting craftsmanship
against Industrial Design, in the wake of the battles fought in England by John Ruskin and William
Morris in the nineteenth century projecting it,
however, in the utopian dimension of a creativity sensitive to the moods of society and its more
disparate cultural fringes.
In 1977, the departure from Casabella and the
creation of the new magazine called MODO,
entirely conceived and founded by Mendini,
coincided with the more decisive turnaround in
the direction of so-called anti-design; this was a
new phase that replaced the pure and tough
opposition against the system with the so-called

infelicitous project. The idea was that of a cynical

acceptance of reality, which, although not being
pacified with the industrial system (from which it
remained extraneous), no longer believed in the
abstract contraposition of ideologies, and instead
hinged around the reconstruction of the object
starting from the observation of everyday reality
and its complexity. The periodical sought possible
new roads of cross-pollination between different
disciplines, giving broad scope to graphics, to
photography, to design, to architecture and even
to fashion (a sector at the time considered to be
wholly extraneous to the culture of the project)
mixing them and multiplying them in a kaleidoscope of images and languages. Within this fertile
humus Mendinis idea of redesign developed,
understood as a new visual language that aimed
to give new meaning to existing things, working
by overlaps and cross-pollination: I invent and
at the same time I copy, because in the pantheism of the huge Milky Way of goods, everything
that I can think of already exists: whats important is that my way of forging things is original
(Originalit del falso, 1997). At this point Mendini,
attaching great importance to the visual and
communicational aspect, worked on a double
register: on the one hand, with the redesign of
six famous designer chairs (the Thonet no. 14,
the Superleggera by Ponti, the Sedia Universale
by Joe Colombo, the Zig Zag by Rietveld, and so
on), to which he added a few new elements and
signs (arrows, flags, decors, colours, etc.); with a
touch of irony he modified their aspect, removing
their aura as design icons; on the other, he ennobled four anonymous sideboards from the 1940s,
decorating them extensively with styles borrowed
from the historical avant-gardes of Constructivism
and Futurism. Similarly, in his series dedicated to
Kandinsky, Mendini took three ordinary objects
like a sofa, a carpet and a plain and simple mirror, gave them a Cubist form, and covered them
with a colourful galaxy of confetti, tails, comets,
Tarots, snakes etc., this time borrowing the styles

25

directly from the painting of the Russian master.

A double ready-made of Dadaist inspiration was
the designers celebrated Proust armchair, where
he took a chair in Baroque style and covered it
with a citation from a pointilliste painting by Signac. Dotting, done by hand with a small brush,
conferred lightness and atmosphere to the object,
which acquired a new meaning strongly allusive
to the fragmentary statute of the reality in which
we live. A reality that can no longer be comprised
within a univocal general and synthetic vision, in
the same way that society cannot be understood
as a uniform mass of indistinct people, but as the
sum of single individuals. The semantic force of
this object is such that in time it has lent itself to
further operations of manipulation by its author,
who has had fun blowing it up, making it smaller,
modifying the texture and the materials used to
make it, proposing a seemlingly endless variety
of versions. All these objects together with others by Branzi, Dalisi, De Lucchi, Navone, Raggi,
Sottsass, UFO, etc. were a part of the Bau-Haus
collection promoted in 1979 by a new avant-garde
group, Studio Alchimia, founded in Milan in 1976
by Alessandro Mendini and Adriana Guerriero
together with Bruno and Giorgio Gregori. The idea
was to give rise to an autonomous production of
non-industrial furnishings to set self-production
against industry, painting to the project, the drawing to the design and to propose these objects
to the public by means of a series of installations.
Mendini clarified the theoretical bases in the
groups manifesto: Today, for Alchimia the work
of the draughtsman is of essential importance.
Drawing, that is, emitting signs, is neither design
nor project: it is a free and continuous movement
of thought thats visually expressed.
Within this perspective decoration took on a
crucial role refused programmatically by orthodox Rationalism, but practiced in one of its
topical places of formation like the Bauhaus of
Weimer which in Mendinis poetics would take
on an increasingly central role because, unlike

26

function, it is a stable, anthropological value

that humanity has always measured itself up to,
and that being superficial has a very strong
emotional and symbolic impact and responds
to needs and desires even when these are unconscious and irrational.
In 1980, at the First Architecture Biennial, Mendini
together with Alchimia promoted the exhibition
on Loggetto banale (The banal object) which,
by contemplating production in a large series, attempted to answer this question: Why not exploit
the natural, intimate and legendary relationship
that is created between man and an object judged
to be ugly in any mass society? Unsurprisingly,
it was precisely the theme of ugliness that was
dealt with in Abraham Moles well-known essay
(Psychologie du kitsch), significantly retitled
kitsch: lart du bonheur, or the art of happiness.
Mendinis new interpretation focused on themes
of interest to everyday life, on the importance of
material culture linked to objects of mass consumption, to the universal nature of the artificial
dimension and to the need for a psychological
study of mans relationship with the environment.
And all without demonizing the difference between an aesthetic high and low, and with an
eye focused on the figure of the everyman. The
term banal therefore signifies an awareness of
the everyday as a new field of study by means of
which to challenge the rules of good taste and
Beautiful Design, capable of releasing new creative energies and bestowing new meanings (by
way of redesign and restyling) to objects that had
become exhausted and stripped of their meaning.
This meant reconceptualizing the designers role
as an intellectual, which would be reconfirmed in
1985 in the introduction to the first Italian translation of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Browns cult
book Learning from Las Vegas; Mendini defined the
situation at the time as neo-modernism (a sort of
mannerism of great twentieth-century modernity)
characterized by the advent of a banal architecture.The anthropological value of what is ugly and

Redesign of 1940s sideboards,

picture touched up with
an airbrush, 1978

what is kitsch was acknowledged, and the visual

pollution of consumer society, as an active part
of the project, was consecrated; this was followed
by an invitation to dirty the works with their users
subconscious creativity.
The end of 1979 was important for Mendini as he
took over the running of the magazine Domus,
which he would continue to do for the next five
years; those were the years of the greatest dissemination of postmodernist culture, whose outcomes
would have a great impact on the changes in
current tastes, inexorably arriving at embracing,
in a striking manner, the design of the everyday
object and even the current series production.
In actual fact, Mendini prefers to speak of neomodern, equating the condition of those years
to historical Mannerism, which did not subvert
the classical rules of the project, but was limited
to corroding them from the inside with the acids
of its criticism and its hermetic irony. The first
premise cast into doubt was that of the authors
individuality, a theme that since then has been
embraced by Mendini in the systematic manner
typical of a laboratory experiment.

Its utmost expression was the group performance

of the Mobile Infinito, enacted in 1980 at the Milan Polytechnics Faculty of Architecture, where
architects, artists and designers, under Mendinis
direction, created a sequence (indeed, an
infinite one) of furniture elements (container
furniture items, tables, beds, bookcases, etc.)
conceived of as a surreal parade of self-ironic
and animated characters. The objects that were
put on stage broke down the functional rationale
and alluded, in a prophetic manner, to a future
domestic landscape whose functions are shuffled, where the traditional, rigid subdivision into
rooms equipped for elementary functions was
overcome. Apartments that, instead of a living
room, kitchen, toilet and bedroom, would have
rooms for swimming, for growing plants, for talking,
reading books [] one could eat in the swimming
room, wash in the plant-growing room, sleep in the
library [] and the living room of the future could
be seen as the headquarters of long-distance
communication (Il nuovo soggiorno, in Domus,
no. 630, 1982). What was being contested was the
so-called authoriality (really the brand in gen-

27

Achenzina, desk,
Collezione Nuova Alchimia,
Zabro, Zanotta, 1986

eral) of design, perfidiously snapping the bond

between designer and project and between the
single item and serial production, according to a
programme of destabilization that would invest
both architecture (the Groninger Museum, for
instance, as an assembly of parts by different
authors) and design itself (Tea & Coffee Piazza).
Likewise the magazine Ollo (1987) consisted of
the application of the method of communication strategy; this was a quarterly for which only
two issues were published, where not only art,
design, architecture and fashion were blended
together without distinction, but even advertising
and the editorial contents were graphically mixed
to the point of not being immediately distinguishable from one another. Ollo was a magazine
with almost no texts (the name itself is an act of
semantic Dadaism), where the image took on a
predominant and obsessive value, increasingly
focusing attention on the terrorism of visibility in
postmodern societies, on the interchangeability
of meanings, and on the obsession for surfaces as

28

100% Make up,

collection of 100 vases,
drawing, Alessi, 1992

bearers (in decor, ornamentation, textures, etc.)

of values independent from ideologies.
But the 1980s, after one decade of self-produced
research objects, also marked the encounter
between Mendini and serial production; two professional situations with a human side developed,
which saw him involved with entrepreneurs like
Alberto Alessi and Aurelio Zanotta. The challenge
in both cases was played out by overcoming the
conflict between original and serial objects, between
art and industry. Mendini managed to exploit the
characteristics of reproducibility typical of industry
without betraying himself, without turning into an
industrial designer, but by creating a new category,
that of useful art, which breaks down the barriers between art, craftsmanship and industry, thus
interpreting the specificity of the designers work. As
regards Zanotta, the manufacturing of furniture in
a series that was hand-decorated, inlaid, carved
or screen-printed in the three collections called
Nuova Alchimia (1984-1986), hence, with a return
to the techniques used by artisans that had begun
to vanish, healed the fracture between craftsmanship and industry, inaugurating the so-called new
craftsmanship. For Alessi, instead, Mendini worked
on the concepts of the multiple, the limited edition
and the diversified series, seeking to overcome the
rift between art and industry: whereas in his tea
and coffee service Tea & Coffee Piazza (1983), by
launching mini-architectures he transposed into
the field of design the theme of the art multiple in
a limited edition, in the project called 100% Make
up (1992) he instead dealt with the theme of the
diversified series by asking one hundred different
artists to decorate a one-off vase model that he
had designed.The crucial theme of decoration in
the sense of universal cosmetic, introduced by
the Proust armchair and its numerous replicas and
variants, had a repercussion on the manufacturing
of large series of objects when Mendini, in 1990,
was appointed artistic director of the Swiss watch
factory Swatch, reviving it on the market thanks to a
plan for its promotion that was both economic and

29

Tte Gante, fibreglass-coated

polystyrene sculpture, 2002.
In the background, Proust sofa and painting,
Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan, Poland

cultural, thus defeating the Japanese competition.

This same theme then took on an autonomous
statute in the design of laminate surfaces, with
the honing of a specific range of decors, signs,
styles and colours that could be used in the different scales of the project, from the object to the
furnishing, to the architecture. Cases in point are
the exterior finishing of the tower of the Groninger
Museum (1988-1994), essentially a macro version,
with large brushstrokes, of the pointilliste technique
Mendini had used for the Proust armchair, or the
enamelled and serigraph metal sheet panels of the
Casin di Arosa in Switzerland (1997), or the yellow
and black checkerboard texture of the Steintor
stop for the Hannover tram (1992).There was also
the work done for the Swatch and Alessi stores by
Atelier Mendini, the productive unit founded in 1989
with his brother Francesco, which also coincided
with the growth of his architectural work. In the
1990s, Mendini reached the peak of his professional success and his utmost fame; fortunately,
the growth of his work did not correspond to a
weakening of his critical thinking nor to his interest
in experimentation. The years of criticism of the
productive system were by then something from
the distant past, and provocation was replaced by
deformation. After having created an apparently

30

inexhaustible kaleidoscope of images, Mendini

must have experienced the feeling of somehow
being caged inside; so to react to the reification
of himself, he used the technique of metaphysical
bewilderment to work on image. For example, by
enlarging things (the Mobili per Uomo, but also
the Lass chair revived at a distance of twenty-five
years as a monument to be placed at the centre
of a square in the German city of Otterbach); or
by fixing the decoration (the Byzantine vision of
gold, from the Alessi vase to the Shama installations) combined with the archaic neo-primitivism
(Visage Archaque) of figures similar to totems, with
the obsessive rewriting of his own story.
A story that had started in 1973 with the rough
Monumentino chair, and had reached, in 2004, his
solemn golden monumentalization: from being
an involuntary emblem, then, of arte povera, to
a chilly representation of an increasingly contiguous archetype, a sacred micro-architecture. As
if by sitting himself down on his Proust armchair,
Mendini had started his own personal recerche
in the meanders of a memory that was anything
but linear. Actually porous, labyrinthine and even
dispersive, as represented in the most autobiographical of his works: the 2010 exhibition Quali
cose siamo held at the Triennale in Milan.

31

I design objects that are more

or less functional, ones that tend
to be small and also occasional,
as Im interested in their form,
material, colour [...] my yearning
isnt that of the functionalist designer
who designs things for everybody.
My approach to design is essentially
artistic and from a technical
standpoint it corresponds to a sort
of technological craftsmanship.
La bottega del designer, 1990

32

Nine miniatures, Short Stories,

drawing, 2004

33

Catalogue of Objects

SUITCASE FOR FINAL

JOURNEY

MONUMENT FOR THE

HOME (PERFORMANCE)

SCIVOLAVO CHAIR

zabro

REDESIGN DESIGNER
CHAIRS

1975 1978

BANAL OBJECT

1980

ENDLESS FURNITURE

ollo

1981

1990

LAMP WITHOUT LIGHT

kandissi

tea & coffee piazza

STRAW CHAIR

proust

sirfo

REDESIGN 40S
SIDEBOARD

34

COSMESIS SWATCH

METROSCAPE SWATCH

alessandro m.
anna g.

fiorucci,
swatch shop

aurora

SUPEREGO COLUMNS

SMALL ELECTRICAL
APPLIANCES

micro macro

euclide

MONUMENTAL PROUST

san francisco

2003

scivolavo,
short stories

2010

100% make up

MENS FURNITURE

giotto

CARTIER COLUMN

GALAXY COLLECTION

LAMINATE SURFACES

asta

WARRIOR ANGEL

anna toile

MONUMENT FOR THE

HOME

35

The Objects

36

OBJECTS FOR SPIRITUAL USE

LASS CHAIR, TABLE AND CHAIR IN SPACE, STRAW CHAIR, SCIVOLAVO

CHAIR, LAMP WITHOUT LIGHT, SUITCASE FOR THE FINAL JOURNEY
Years: 1974-1975

Chairs that burn amidst the flames or that float

in space like the planets, giant chairs made
from straw or that feature dramatically tilted
planes, lamps cast in bronze but with no light,
and a suitcase fastened to the ground that
cant be lifted: these are some of the irreverent
objects for spiritual use that Mendini designed
in the early 1970s to express his radical criticism
of a production system exclusively
based on functionality, obedient
to a society built upon the allembracing legends of
technology, efficiency and
consumption. These are all
research objects designed
not to be placed on the market

Lass chair,
drawing, 1975

38

but as one-off pieces, to the extent that a

number of them were born out of visual
performances conceived for the covers of the
periodical Casabella. This is scenic furniture for
fake interiors, which, by way of form, material or
size, unhinges the usual rationale attributed to
its function and through which Mendini wishes
to stimulate a critical reflection on the
behaviour linked to its use, such as
working, talking, eating, sleeping,
etc., bringing to the design sphere
that performative attitude based
on the visual paradoxes that had
been developed in the early twentieth
century by such artistic avantgarde movements as Dadaism
and Surrealism.

Rocking chair, drawing, 1975

Table and chair in space,
cover for Casabella, no. 399, 1975
Monumentino da casa,
performance, 1975

39

Scivolavo chair and Elisa when

she was a child, 1975
Scivolavo chair, stainless steel,
Short Stories, 2010

40

41

Letargo lamp, drawing

on transparency, 1975
Lamp without light, Bauhaus
redesign, bronze, Bracciodiferro
for Cassina, 1975
Straw chair, 1975
Suitcase for the final journey,
aluminium, 1975

42

43

REDESIGN OF ANONYMOUS AND DESIGNER FURNITURE

WASSILY BY MARCEL BREUER, SUPERLEGGERA BY GIO PONTI, HILL HOUSE BY

CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH, THONET NO. 14, ZIG ZAG BY GERRIT REITVELD,
SEDIA UNIVERSALE BY JOE COLOMBO, 1940S SIDEBOARDS
Year: 1978

After the brave season of anti-design which

had focused on the destruction of the object
that was seen as being merely a utensil had
come to an end, 1978 marked the start of a new
creative phase during which the reconstruction
of the object came about through the strategy
known as redesign: this operation of very strong
visual impact consisted in laying out new forms,
colours and styles on objects that already
existed, thereby reinterpreting their meaning in a
nonchalant and ironic way, transforming them
into objects with a poetic reaction capable of
releasing positive energies. Hence, an
undisputed icon of Rationalist Design such as
Breuers Wassily was made less dramatic with the
addition of free and colourful forms, clearly in

contrast with the authors intentions. The addition

of small coloured flags flapping in the wind to
Gio Pontis Superleggera played ironically on the
lightness of the object. Likewise, the typically tall
back on Mackintoshs Hill House chair was
emphasized by two arrow-shaped flags placed
at the very top of slender metal rods on the
shoulder rest, thus paradoxically making the
chair seem even taller. As for Mendinis redesign
of 1940s sideboards, the goal was the rescue of
anonymous objects, ennobled and made more
beautiful by an extensive decoration in Futurist
style on the surface, harking back to the patterns
in Kandinskys painting and using collage to add
new formal elements in continuity with the
surface design.

Redesign of the Wassily chair

by Marcel Breueur, drawing, 1978
Redesign of a 1940s sideboard,
painted by Prospero Rasulo, 1978

44

45

46

Redesign of chairs from the Modern

Movement, drawings, 1978
opposite page from left,
redesign of the following chairs:
Zig Zag by Gerrit Rietveld; Superleggera
by Gio Ponti; Thonet no. 14;
Sedia Universale by Joe Colombo

47

KANDISSI FAMILY

KANDISSI SOFA, KANDISSONE WALL HANGING, KANDISSA MIRROR,

ALCHIMIA COLLECTION, BAU-HAUS SIDE ONE
Year: 1978-1979

The idea behind redesign means producing a

family of objects a sofa, a mirror and a wall
hanging which all have the same decorative
pattern in common, born out of the synergy of
figurative motifs borrowed from Czech Cubism,
Deperos Italian Futurism, and Kandinskys
painting, to whom the whole series is
dedicated. Mendinis skill lies in his ability to
interpret some of the most important twentiethcentury avant-garde movements Cubism,
Futurism and Abstractionism as a repertoire of
signs that can be combined, juxtaposed or
rewritten, breathing life into a new visual
alphabet that spreads out on the surface of his
objects and decorates them. In the case of the
Kandissi sofa and the Kandissa mirror, the decor
is independent and vital, so that it changes the
very shape of the objects, projecting them into
different directions in space: the painting
generates the decoration, which in turn
generates the objects. Within this same realm is
the use of colour as an instance of ideal
happiness to offer all of mankind, and element
that, during that period, exploded
unexpectedly in the designers work.

Kandissi sofa, 1978

48

49

Kandissa, mirror, Collezione

Alchimia - Bau-Haus Side One, 1979
New edition, Collezione Nuova Alchimia,
Zabro Zanotta, 1985
Kandissone, wall hanging, Collezione
Alchimia - Bau-Haus Side One, 1979

50

51

PROUST ARMCHAIR
Year: 1978
Materials: wood and painted fabric

The idea for this particular object came from

the yearning to dedicate an armchair to the
great French writer by proceeding
unconventionally and by literary decision, i.e.
without actually drawing it but rather by
covering a banal faux-Baroque armchair with
some of the details from the meadows painted
by Paul Signac, and in this case painted with a
brush directly onto the fabric itself. The
conception of time as an accumulation of
endless memories and fragments of memory
evoked by Proust in his Recherche is visualized
by Mendini in the pointillist weave that covers
the whole armchair, from the wooden parts to
the upholstery, undoing form and making
everything seem lighter. The result of this twofold
ready-made is a whole new image, a complex
and deliberately ambiguous one that sets the
faux, which recalls the antique (the vintage
armchair), on the same level as the new, as
expressed by the avant-garde (pointillism). With
a totally cerebral approach of the Dadaist kind,
which refutes drawing but not painting, the
Proust armchair expresses its status as an object
that is never finished, bestowing life, over time,
to a series of multiples, identical in substance
but different in form, time after time modifying
their dimensions (by shrinking or enlarging),
materials (from bronze to ceramics), decor
(hand-painted, printed, and so on).

Proust and Sabrina armchairs,

drawing for Interno di un Interno, 1991
Monumental Proust mosaic chair,
3 x 3 metres in size, Bisazza, 2005

52

53

54

from the left

Geometrica armchair,
Cappellini, 2009
Proust armchair, 1978
Mozart armchair, painted
by Claudia Mendini, 2000

55

DECORS, STYLES AND LAMINATE SURFACES

Years: from 1980
Company: Abet Laminati

The intrinsic modernity of a material like laminate

constitutes the perfect support for a graphic-like
reproduction of decorative systems, and offers
Mendini the chance to fine-tune several textures
based on specific decors, signs and styles. Thus
are born the Ollo, Swatch, Proust, Swatch Atlanta,
Proust Groningen, Galla Placidia Piccolo, Galla
Placidia Grande and Oro Nero series that express
different forms of visual script and draw the
viewers attention. They can be applied to the
world of objects (Mobile Infinito, Zabro collection,
Ollo series, etc.), to wallpaperas was done
for the exhibition spaces and stands for Alessi
and Swatchand to exterior architectural
surfaces. One such example concerns the
large panels in gilt laminate and polychrome
laminate for the Groninger Museum, and the
black-and-gold checkerboard laminate for
a tram stop in Hannover. Within the realm
of a conception of art, design and architecture
where decoration takes on a key role, a transfer
of textures from one project to another, even
if this means leaps in scale from the object to
the building and vice versa, becomes possible.

Galla Placidia Grande,

laminate, project with Alchimia
and Anna Lombardi, Abet, 1989
Swatch, laminate, project
with Fulvia Mendini, Abet, 1996

56

Groninger Museum, drawings, 1990

pp. 58-59
Shama, installation, project
with Alex Mocika and Elisa Mendini,
Groninger Museum Collection,
The Netherlands, 1992

57

MOBILE INFINITO (ENDLESS FURNITURE)

Project with: Alchimia and others
Year: 1981

On September 18, 1981, in the courtyard of the

Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Architecture
viewers witnessed a performance by Mobile
Infinito, a group action that involved a large
number of architects and artists directed by
Alessandro Mendini in collaboration with Studio
Alchimia. The aim was to bring about a free
sequence that would ideally unfold endlessly of
all the elements that make up the usual
typologies of domestic furniture - containers,
chairs, tables and lamps - with a radically
eclectic approach to the project: each single
object was indeed the result of the assembly of
different parts (legs, handles, decorations,

Mobile Infinito, collection skyline,

drawing, 1981

60

decorative objects, etc.) designed by different

authors independently and deliberately
uncoordinated. The decors for the interiors
featured, with a taste for citation, the
reproduction of some of the designs by Bruno
Munari (1947), Gio Ponti (1952), and Luigi
Veronesi (1973). The result of this action was a
cheery parade of objects in celebration,
embellished, decorated and coloured with
banners, feathers, signs, figures, flags, rods and
arabesques, that took on uncertain, mysterious
and dreamlike appearances, as if they were the
physical transposition of the hallucinations and
enchantments that trouble our minds.

Decoration of the table top La morte che mangia

luva by Francesco Clemente, magnetic decorations
by Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino;
legs by Denis Santachiara, decorations inside by
Alchimia, Bruno Munari, Gio Ponti and Luigi Veronesi.

61

AESTHETIC FACTORY

TEA & COFFEE PIAZZA, 100% MAKE UP, ANNA G., ALESSANDRO M., ASTA
Years: 1983, 1992, 1994, 2004
Company: Alessi

The research that led to Tea & Coffee Piazza

was born out of a sharp insight: the idea of
transposing to the design realm the theme of
so-called art multiples by applying them to an
icon of the domestic world like the tea and
coffee service, so as to stimulate product
innovation in the home goods sector. Involved
in the project were some of the most promising
young architects of those years, who bestowed
life on a full-fledged collection of microarchitectures for the home featuring a strongly
expressive and individual nature. The project
100% Make up is a reflection upon a similar
theme in the designers diversified series: 100
vases all identical in shape designed by
Mendini himself decorated by 100 different
authors (artists, architects, designers and others
too) and produced in 100 units each, for a total
of 10,000 pieces. A choral work that breaks
down the concept of the anonymous industrial
series, to instead offer a constellation of visual
tales expressing the force of the ornament as
language that is at once universal and
individual. The tendency towards multiplication
is also visible in Anna G. and Alessandro M. who
appear to be real characters each with their
own personality, a rich wardrobe, and even
capable of having a family (Anna G. Family).

Tea & Coffee Piazza, silver tea and

coffee service, project by Maria
Christina Hamel, Alessi, 1983
Asta, stainless steel flatware, project
with Annalisa Margarini, Alessi, 2004

62

63

100% Make up, drawing for

an exhibition, Alessi, 1992
100% Make up, porcelain
vase decorated by Marah
Voce, Alessi, 1992
100% Make up: Golden vase,
porcelain, Alessi Tendentse, 1992

64

65

Alessandro M., drawing, Alessi, 2003

Anna G. and Alessandro M. Proust,
corkscrew, project with Piero Gaeta
and Annalisa Margarini, Alessi, 2003
Alessandro M. and Anna G.,
drawings, Alessi, 2003

66

67

ZABRO

COLLEZIONE NUOVA ALCHIMIA

Years: 1984, 1985, 1986
Company: Zanotta

The three Zabro collections represent a spin-off

on the level of production in a series of the
experiments Mendini conducted with Studio
Alchimia: the idea was to go from the selfproduced furniture that had characterized
that highly creative season, to the realization
of furniture built to the highest professional
standards, paying close attention to the minutest
detail. The designers collaboration with
a leading company in the
manufacturing of socalled Bel Design
Italiano, such as the
Aurelio Zanotta
company, proved to be
a winning choice also in
terms of the products
commercial success. The
idea was to breathe new life

Agrilo, drawing, Zabro, Zanotta, 1984

Cetonia, chest of drawers, Collezione
Nuova Alchimia, Zabro, Zanotta, 1984
Sirfo, side table, Collezione Nuova
Alchimia, Zabro, Zanotta, 1986
Agrilo, console table, Collezione
Nuova Alchimia, Zabro, Zanotta, 1984

68

into a collection of original objects that could

stay on the market, while at the same time keep
the Alchimia experience alive without betraying
its original spirit. To do this the designer modified
his palette of colours towards softer and more
classical hues, such as in the Cetonia chest of
drawers, or by inventing new typologies, such as
the table-chair, or inventing new figurative
solutions, for instance, Mendinis
famous duck-shaped Sirfo
table reminiscent of Walt
Disney cartoons, introducing
the concept of ironic design
and the comic-strip object.
None of these objects pass by
unnoticed, and their shapes
allude to a lively and joyous
organic universe, transcending
the abstract and rigid dimension
of the rational.

69

70

Mikiolone, cocktail cabinet,

Collezione Nuova Alchimia,
Zabro, Zanotta, 1986
Zabro, table-chair, Collezione Nuova
Alchimia, Zabro, Zanotta, 1984

71

OLLO: A NEW ALPHABET

COLLEZIONE ALCHIMIA
Years: 1987-1990

The Ollo series was unveiled in 1987 with an installation

made up of three paintings, three shelves and a vase,
presented at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany. The
sacred nature of the representation emerges from
the design of universal styles, such as the motif on the
column and the arch, that leaps from the twodimensionality of the drawing to the threedimensionality of the objects as tools of pure visual
reality; this is based on the concept of the extension
of the design that stems from Futurism and from its
utopia of covering the whole universe with signs. The
Ollo forms are the expression of a painterly design:
they are born out of the continuous and free unfolding
of thought and in no way involve planning and
organization in the project phase. This new visual
alphabet is translated by the Alchimia group into
things furniture, carpets, vases, glassware,
decorations and fabrics which are produced in a
limited edition. Ollo is also the name of a magazine
without a message in which Mendini deals with
themes that differ greatly from one another (kitsch,
hunger, theatre, sex, sport, death, and so on) by
matching images freely (the pages are not bound,
nor is there a table of contents and the only text is the
editorial); each one of its readers can assemble the
magazine in any way he or she wishes, foreshadowing
the hypertext of more recent times.

Ollo, bookshelf, Collezione Achimia, 1988

Ollo, Collezione Alchimia of furniture
and objects, installation, Milan, 1988
Magical Neo-Functionalism, installation,
Genius Loci II, project with Carla Ceccariglia
and Anna Gili, Abitare il tempo, Verona, 1989

72

73

DECORATING TIME
Years: 1990-1994
Company: Swatch

Mendinis appointment as artistic director of the

Swiss watch factory gave him the chance to
bring the concept of pictorial design, which
he had already expressed while experimenting
with the Proust armchair, to new commercial
heights. The design for a Swatch watch
coincides with the decor of its surface which,
like a kaleidoscope, is open to never-ending
and infinite variations of images, signs and
colours; the choice of specific themes ethnic,
neo-naturalist, primordial, neo-classical,
totemic, etc. is the result of the joint effort
made by a number of architects, designers and
artists, who work the same way stylists do on
fashion collections. An object thats technically
perfect, with a high aesthetic quality but lowpriced, thus effortlessly overcomes the
dimension of needing to be useful. It becomes
a cult, a collectors item and, most importantly,
a means of communication that anyone can
wear to express his or her personality, state of
mind or world vision. Atelier Mendini has
designed hundreds of exhibition spaces, sales
points and shops for the Swatch company,
using a language that is easily recognized for its
playful, dreamlike and colourful nature,
bringing all the scales of the project
(architecture, interior decoration, the object)
within a single alluring visual imaginary.

Swatch watch, drawing, 1990

74

Crystal Surprise, wristwatch, Swatch, 1993

Lots of dots, wristwatch, Swatch, 1992
Cosmesis, wristwatch, Swatch, 1990
Metroscape, wristwatch, Swatch, 1990

75

Swatch Shop, Via Cesare Battisti,

project with Francesco Mendini
and Andrea Balzari, Padua, 1996

Fiorucci, Swatch Shop, project

with Francesco Mendini and Andrea
Balzari, Milan, 1992

77

LUMINOUS OBJECTS
GALASSIA COLLECTION
Year: 1993
Company: Venini

The Galassia (Galaxy) collection for Venini

consists of large lamps with fanciful names
alluding to mythological figures for
instance, Alioth, Agena, Antares, Aldebaran,
Achemar and Arkab that, like planets
around a galaxy, revolve around their own
axis in a space that stretches into infinity.
Mendini interprets the theme of the lamp not
just as a functional object used for its lighting
features, but also as an emotional object
capable of engendering visual suggestions
in the observer. Mendinis collaboration with
Murano glassmakers gave him the
opportunity to experiment with the different
ways of working with a pliable material like
glass, modifying the paste, the decor, and,
above all, its colours and transparency. The
chandelier called Achenar represents a
modern reinterpretation of the traditional
Venetian chandelier; it is simple in geometry
(circles, spheres and cylinders) and
embellished with colour. The Agena lamp,
along with the other four floor lamps, instead
alludes to biological forms, some of which
monstruous (but the colour keeps it ironic),
while others are more closely linked to a
spatial imaginary made up of discs, rings
and spheres. Lamps playing the part of merry
luminous objects that inhabit our homes.

78

Alioth, Murano glass floor lamp,

Collezione Galassia, Venini, 1993
Agena, Murano glass pendant lamp,
Collezione Galassia, Venini, 1993
Aldebaran, Murano glass floor lamp,
Collezione Galassia, Venini, 1993

79

SMALL ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES

TOASTER, KETTLE, COFFEE MAKER, CITRUS SQUEEZER

Year: 1994
Company: Philips by Alessi

These small kitchen appliances are born from

an unprecedented but fruitful collaboration
between the multinational Philips, a high-tech
manufacturer and a world leader in the
production of electrical appliances, and Alessi,
an Italian company, which instead wants to be
known as a cutting-edge aesthetic factory,
attentive to both experimentation and forms. The
challenge consisted in designing complex
objects to be manufactured in a series, thus
crossing design that is strictly functionalist and
perhaps excessively subordinated to marketing,
with a freer humanistic dimension capable of

80

conveying new meanings at a cultural,

psychological and semantic level turning the
kitchen into a more pleasant and peoplefriendly environment. The result of this was
a small family of Neo-Pop objects that, in a
hyperrealistic key, offer a possible solution to
modernitys typical dialectic between artifice
and nature: the rounded shapes of these
objects, which are meant to bring to mind the
first plastic appliances of the 1950s and 60s, are
designed to look like stones smoothed over by
water in faded colours, as if the user had come
across those objects in a fast-running stream.

Philips by Alessi, coffee maker interpreted by Jacovitti, 1994

81

82

83

MOBILI PER UOMO (MENS FURNITURE)

Years: from 1997
Company: Bisazza

In his Mobili per Uomo collection Mendini

focuses on the concept of the dimensional
aberration, producing simple container
pieces made of black metal that, beyond
their practical use, are conceived to be used
as supports for large gold leaf mosaic glass
sculptures. These are the fetish objects that
make up the life of the typical businessman,
but Mendini has blown then up to
paradoxical size: they include a Borsalino
hat, a managers briefcase, a coffee cup, a
shoe, a glove, a jacket, and so on. A mans
presence is evoked in hyperrealistic and
ironic terms, revealing the objects that
substantiate his everyday life and enlarging
them to a gigantic size the opposite of
which is the shrinking process devices that
Mendini is very fond of using in his work.
Objects that become huge Pop idols, yet lit
up by the mosaic that breaks up the image,
much in the way pointillism does. Gold leaf is
like a royal cloak, ennobling the dimensions
of the mundane.

Mobili per Uomo, drawings,

Bisazza, 1997
pp. 86-87
Mobili per Uomo, Shoe, Jacket, Hand, Hat,
Lamp, Cup, Head, Briefcase, Star, project
with Bruno Gregori, Fondazione Bisazza,
Alte (Vicenza), 1997-2008

84

85

86

87

ANTHROPOMORPHIC OBJECTS

VISAGE ARCAQUE, TTE GANTE, GLASS WARRIORS,

GIOTTO, WARRIOR ANGEL
Years: 2001-2009
Companies: Bisazza, Cartier, Venini

The presence of anthropomorphic objects

crosses the history of mankind: finding oneself
before an object that has a face resembling
that of a human being immediately creates a
sympathetic tie that makes it easier to establish
an amicable relationship with the object.
Mendini believes in this type of relationship
and over the last decade he has produced a
collection of gigantic oversized heads made
by combining basic geometric shapes, built
from a variety of materials, and inspired by the
primitive art of Russian Constructivism. For
Fragilisme, an exhibition organized by the
Fondation Cartier pour lart contemporain
in Paris, 2002, he designed a cheerful and
colourful fibreglass head, and that same year
he brought out his Visage arcaque, a precious
hand-cut gold mosaic wearing a crystal jewel
by Swaroski. For Venini, he created a series of
glass heads the Glass Warrior and the Warrior
Angel that have something enigmatic and
menacing about them: Their most archaic
references are the statues on Easter Island, their
most future references are the unknown figures
of creatures from other planets. With their
subtle, elongated and ambiguous black eyes
[...] they look pensively upon our complicated
world [...] could they be the mercenary soldiers
of the new intellectual wars? (A. Mendini,
Venini. Guerrieri di vetro, 2001, in Alessandro
Mendini. Scritti, Milan: Skira, 2004).

Visage Arcaque, gold mosaic sculpture,

Bisazza, 2002, Fondation Cartier pour lart
contemporain, Paris
Giotto, Murano glass sculpture, Venini, 2005

88

89

90

Angelo Guerriero, Murano glass

sculpture, Venini, 2009
Angelo Guerriero, drawings,
Venini, 2007

91

ARCHITECTURE FOR THE HOME

SAN FRANCISCO, VENICE, LOS ANGELES, GOLDEN GATE

Year: 2008
Company: Cleto Munari

The new collection of furniture and objects for the

home designed by Mendini and manufactured
by Cleto Munari in a limited edition includes three
pieces of furniture a partition, a closet and a
cocktail cabinet made from wood lacquered
in bright colours. The pieces were perhaps
conceived as small architectures for the home
that allude to three different cities:
San Francisco, Venice and Los
Angeles. There is also a table
called Golden Gate, with a
transparent glass top engraved
with graffiti, patterns and words
expressed freely. And also
a part of the collection is
the series of large silver
sculptures and four
woollen carpets.
The collection was
produced in a
limited series
(an edition of only

nine for the furniture) and expresses some of the

themes Mendini cherishes most of all, such as
the importance of skill, guaranteed here by the
craftsmanship used to make the objects, and the
use of patterns that migrate (to and fro) from the
two-dimensional surfaces of the carpets to the
sculptures and, by growing in size, albeit
remaining coherent, bestowing
new life on the furniture forms
and the decors. The collection
comes from an amusing
recipe: choose several
materials, choose several
procedures, choose several
typologies, choose several
colours, mix them all together
with a Cleto in a formalistic
game, bring to boiling point
and then serve in
the home or at the
museum in a very
strong light.

San Francisco, space

divider, Cleto Munari, 2008
Architecture for Domus,
drawing, 2000

92

93

Los Angeles, cocktail cabinet,

Cleto Munari, 2008
Venice, secretary,
Cleto Munari, 2008

94

Los Angeles, drawing,

Cleto Munari, 2008

95

COLUMNS
Years: 2008-2009
Companies: Cleto Munari, Superego, Cartier

The column is a recurring icon in Mendinis

fantastic imaginary, and is born out of the
juxtaposition of different forms and materials
with the addition of specific dimensional
aberrations that attract the viewers attention
and make him or her reflect. The columns in
the Micro Macro collection by Cleto Munari
are an experiment with the relationship
between constriction and free form: a series
of vases stacked one atop the other and
closed within a rigid iron cage, with Murano
glass blown freely inside. A sketch of the
object shifts its meaning, so that it becomes a
sort of skyscraper; if repeated, it creates a city
skyline. Mendinis columns for Superego are
huge anthropomorphic totems, made up of
the overlapping of different glass and metal
organic and geometric shapes that dialogue
like the actors on a stage. Mendinis column
for Cartier in 2009 is a reflection upon object
life-cycles: a big jewel over two metres tall
made from stacking up the by-products from
the cutting of precious stones (rubies, pearls,
emeralds, sapphires, etc.), which cannot be
used to make jewelry, encapsulated in crystal
cylinders inside grooves of pink gold.

Cartier column, drawings, 2007-2009

Salon Prcieux Cartier, gold and
gemstone column, project with Young
Hee Cha, Art Basel, Basel, 2009

96

97

98

Cartier column, detail

Cartier column, drawing, 2007-2009

99

Micro Macro: Large Tower, Murano

glass and iron, Cleto Munari, 2003
Micro Macro, drawing,
Cleto Munari, 2003

100

101

Columns: Criso, Elgin, Stilobate, Kalamis,

ceramics, Superego, 2003

102

Columns: Dipylon, Opistodomo, Naos, Entasi,

ceramics, Superego, 2003

103

A New Utopia

104

p. 105
The designers outfit, project with Kean Etro, Etro, 2003
Swatch watch, drawing, 1990

Graziella Leyla Ciag The situation of the

Milan Furniture Show is a clear indication of what
has by now become an unstoppable process: the
extension of the field of design to the point that we
can say that everything is design and that there is
a design for everything. What do you think?
Alessandro Mendini Design can be a term
enclosed inside what once was, or else it can
be extended to become other things, so far as
to include more extended design phenomena,
even virtual ones. I can see it inserted within the
parabola of the objects, extended to the millennia
of the applied arts. Design on which I know how
to reason produces physical things. Things that
are. I do not deny the other aspects, theres a
lot of space, from art to mass production. We are
also witnessing the novelty of a technological
neo-craftsmanship that has nothing to do with
the process of industrial production, but that only
exploits some industrial components. See how
they make satellites.
G.L.C.What do you think of contemporary design?
What suggestions can you give to young designers?
A.M. I never want to give general advice, its
just not in my nature to do so. But I do think that
today design is little inclined to thinking and that
it is very superficial. Whenever I hold workshops
I suggest that the participants concentrate on
reasoning, only afterwards can things actually
happen. Each one of us has a personal attitude
and works well when he or she has well identified
him or herself; there are people who have a rational attitude and who know how to develop the
functional aspect of the object; there are those
who are more emotional, those who are artists. In
general, I dont speak of design, I prefer to speak
of things, and things are actually the mirror of
the person who owns them. In order to understand
a person it is enough to look at the first hundred
things that surround him or her: each one of us

106

has a swarm of objects that revolve around us

and that come into conflict or are in harmony with
those of others. This means that when we design,
we always need to keep in mind what were doing
and be aware of everything that surrounds us.
I am not without sin. I have made objects of great
luxury, I have also made things that are full of
mistakes and this is why my objects include the
good one, the bad one, the nice one, the unlucky
one, etc.
G.L.C. What is your working method?
A.M. When I work for myself I have the utmost
freedom: I make something that often simulates a
piece of furniture, but that is actually a sculpture or

Oggetto Meditativo (Meditative

Object), crystal, project with
Michela Pagani, Swarovski, 1999

a prototype. Instead, when I act as a professional,

I find it dutiful to give my client some answers.
There are of course transfers from one experience
to the other: for Swatch I have designed watches
produced in 120,000 copies at a certain price for
a given market, but I have also designed limited
edition Swatches produced in very small numbers;
or else I have transferred my personal stylematics
to objects for Alessi. The projects are presented
as a thesis to be proven: a project starts, I find a
motivation in it and transform it into an experience.
An object can show the virtuosity of blown glass,
another symbolic research. I identify some themes,
which are born from the project itself, and then
perhaps I load them with induced motivations,
which increase their interest. I work at the same
time on very different things in terms of typology,
materials and techniques; what keeps them all
joined together is a sort of mesh, a net, that allows me to weave the different situations between
them. I work at the same time on dozens of projects I cant do just one project at a time so
that they are in synchrony between themselves,
one checks the other and they are all inside one
same network of thinking. Some examples are
the theoretical layout for the new season of the
magazine Domus, the third edition of the Design
Museum at the Milan Triennale, and the Depero
exhibition in Rovereto: projects that are related to
one another and have evolved together.
G.L.C. Which have been the sources of inspiration of your work?
A.M. I work in a very methodical manner, so I
act deliberately; to design spiritual objects I work
in a rational way! I am a scholar, I read many
books, I look at everything, I study, I capture images in blanket fashion. The multiple structure of
the day-to-day is very interesting for me, because
it leads me to connecting situations that are absolutely different from one another. Right now, Im
particularly interested in the forms of the Baroque

because I want to make some large papier-mch

objects. I am also working on totemic furniture,
characters to be placed in the middle of the room
to be put opposite each other so I go towards
certain directions and look at certain columns of
the Buddhist temples that inspire this hypothesis
in my mind ...
G.L.C. You said that your work is an attempt to
overturn the negativity of the real. Does this mean
that your objects, with their forms, signs, colours
and decor have, in the final analysis, the aim of
making our lives merry, helping us to live better?
A.M. I am a born pessimist: during the Radical
period I drew bronze objects that emerged from the

107

Qui, Quo, Qua, container units,

Galleria Paolo Curti and Annamaria
Gambuzzi, Milan, 2009

ground, or straw armchairs, like a sort of unhappy

ecology.Then I thought that given the socio-political
negativity of the world and its violence, what I could
concretely do was propose things that aroused
some discussion, thought and spirituality, that
were self-ironic and that were able to offload the
rhetoric. Stage objects for a tragicomedy which are
related to one another, even without people being
involved. My objects are a kind of backstage prop
for a possible commedia dellarte.
G.L.C. What sense does it make to reissue today
in a gold version the Radical objects from the
1970s, for instance the Lass chair?

108

A.M. The Lass chair at that moment in history

was a hard performance whose meaning was
to speak of the life and the death of the object,
whereas when I go back to it today, by producing a
smaller, golden version of it I transform it into a sort
of memory, the idol of what it once was. Its a sort
of relic. I have always redesigned my objects, I go
forwards and backwards and every now and again
I get disoriented.The Proust armchair, for example, is
a phenomenon that continues to slip away from my
hands, it keeps being reborn on its own account. I
live in a labyrinthine situation, I find myself on roads
already travelled upon, every now and then I get
lost, then I go down a new road, often I go back.

G.L.C. What were the most important artistic

movements for your cultural education?
A.M. Definitely Futurism and Cubism. For the
furniture and objects definitely Czech Cubism
(there are some fantastic things at the Museum
of Applied Arts in Prague!). The first figures to interest me were Eric Mendelsohn, Antoni Gaud and
Rudolf Steiner: three hard-core expressionists.
Expressionism for me means emotional emphasis
to be placed alongside the most glorious patterns
of Futurism. And then, for reasons of personal affection, I like to remember Gio Ponti.
G.L.C. In 1976, you theorized the need for the
de-project (a U-turn towards a new naturalness
for man); do you still think this is a practicable
prospect? Is there an ethical responsibility on the
social level in the work of a designer?
A.M. That was the period when Toms Maldonado had written Design, Nature and Revolution:
Towards a Critical Ecology, and, even if we are
completely on the opposite side from his thinking,
I interpret his rational thesis of control as a fact of
moral self-conscience. Our work calls for dedication, we have an ethical responsibility towards
society, but as our capacity for a political impact
is scarce, I look for morality in the material sense of
the things I do. For instance, I look for morality, lets
say, in the magic of blown glass. At the moment,
Im working in Korea with green celadon ceramics,
which is still manufactured in medieval wood-fired
kilns. This sort of retro-dating of ourselves, which is
obtained by doing something that was done in
the past, is a formidable experience of decanting the neuroses that are so characteristic of our
contemporaneousness. There are indeed many
ways of taking on responsibilities, that must first
of all be taken towards oneself and then towards
ones own work. As regards the consumption of
resources, remaining on the level of utopia, it would
be enough if people acted according to certain

rationales, which are extremely elementary: dont

consume too much, dont move too much, think
of the daily consequences of what you do.
G.L.C. What do you think of the Internet?
A.M. Access to information via the Internet can
create problems; for example, looking at hundreds
of works of architecture in real time in a solipsistic
way certainly does not help us to develop critical
thinking. Indiscriminate access to all that is pseudoknowable engenders mental confusion. We need
to be fine intellects to be able to discriminate.
Its an open problem. I think that in the field of
architecture all this is causing harm, but in the
political field, for instance, the current situation in
North Africa, its doing good.
G.L.C. What does it mean, to use one of your
most famous expressions, to be sentimental robots?
A.M. I think that, broadly speaking, we are all
non-sentimental robots. Humanism calls for slowness, it cant go too fast, it calls for the capacity to
read history as if it were a pendulum, going back
at least until the Renaissance, if not even the Middle Ages. Sentiment is at the heart of everything.
Reason in itself is not reasonable as it is rigid, it is
modern vis--vis postmodern. I strongly believe in
the postmodern even if the word is obsolete. After
Radical Design, after the Bauhaus (in its spiritualist
aspect), after Jean Baudrillard, everything in thinking changed in relation to the Modern. Before the
road was univocal and linked to the word progress,
which for me is the wrong word as it implies the word
product, goods or hyper-technological research, it
implies the domination of the economy over man.
G.L.C. How can the domination of the economy
and consumer society be offset?
A.M. A revival of Radical Design is taking place
today, which might trigger some new kind of radical

109

Oggetto banale (Banal Object):

coffee maker and vaporizer,
project with Paola Navone,
Daniela Puppa, Franco Raggi and
Alchimia, Venice Biennale, 1980

rethinking in regard to society in its current state. I

expect there to be (on the part of others, no longer
on my part) a radicalization of the project: the
starting point is to avoid acquiescence, to avoid
undergoing with pleasure the neutralization of
ourselves. My ideological moments were always
connected to my magazines; anti-design meant
Casabella, MODO was the period of the parallelism between disciplines (the baker the same as
the photographer, the same as the architect, the
same as the potter), while Domus was the postmodern. At this moment in time to make a new
year of Domus, I have prefigured the ideology, the
hypothesis of a New Utopia. Because in order
to make a magazine you need to have a
yardstick that will help you judge what should
be said and published. The word
Humanism has allowed me
to do this work. Utopia is a
strong mirage, but we know
it cant be achieved. So to
put the focus on the humanistic
aspect I discarded actuality and
introduced a lot of historical works,
also including psychological design
(Jungs house, Freuds study, Bacons
study).
G.L.C. Do you think that a New
Utopia is necessary today?
A.M. I keep saying that a New
Utopia is necessary. I long for it, but
at the same time I have a hard time
putting it into practice. It should be
done by people who are sixty years
younger than me. Its important to
look - allow me to repeat myself
- in the humanist direction Romanticism and Humanism are
fundamental values while the

110

dominant value today is hyper-technologism, often

combined with a false idea of ecology, which is
actually linked to the opening up of sinister new
markets. Even in architecture there prevails a stylism that exists for its own sake, which often masks
what is, to all effects, a new form of speculation
on the land. Im not saying you have to work in
a castigated way for a luckless pauperism but,
undoubtedly, we need to work with more self-control
and more generosity towards others.
G.L.C. Would you dedicate an exhibition today
to the everyday object?
A.M. I certainly would. Actually, I might well
do that. I would like to hold
an exhibition on the history
of self-production also
adding figures such as
the English eighteenthcentury engravers a
phenomenon that has its
own autonomy in regard
to industry, craftsmanship and art. A critical vision of the self-production
of everyday objects could contain
that radicalism I was talking about.
These are people who decide to
do everything by themselves. It
could be a way to undermine
the system. Even Alchimia was a
very important phenomenon of
self-production, when we didnt
have a penny to make our own
works, and werent even free to
go around the centre of Milan.
Because in Monte Napoleone
the Nice Design snobs would
smile ironically and make cynical remarks as we passed by.

The Useful Art

112

p. 113
Groninger Museum, golden tower for storage and museum
entrance, project with Francesco Mendini and Alchimia,
Groningen, The Netherlands, 1989-1994
Invited architects: Michele De Lucchi, Philippe Starck,
Coop Himmelb(l)au. Laminato Oro, Abet

The earliest publications on the work of Alessandro

Mendini evolved from within the movements for
Radical architecture of the 1970s, and underscored his charismatic value as a person who was at
the heart of the various experiences; they paused
upon the designers intense activity as a promoter
of exhibitions, performances and collections that
programmatically substantiated the groups action
in the early 1980s, from the Elogio del Banale (In
Praise of the Banal), to Mobili Infiniti (Infinite Furniture), and to the Bau-Haus collections.
An early attempt to define Mendinis industriousness,
within a broader international context (especially with reference to the Austrian architect Hans
Hollein as regards the theme of memory, and to
Frantisek Lesak or Missing Links actions aimed
at the rediscovery of the bodys physicality in its
interrelationship with the environment), was first
suggested by Fulvio Irace in the catalogue for As-

114

Black Out: Bar Furniture, Affinit Elettive,

project with Alchimia and Anna Gili,
Guido Antonello Collection,
Milan Triennale, 1984

senza/Presenza: unipotesi per larchitettura (1977)

held at the Galleria Comunale dArte Moderna in
Bologna. Mendinis behavioural design, his theatrical objects, would thus be the expression of the
anxiety of a memory that has unexpectedly lost
the object of its remembering, and the paradoxes
of a cynical and disconsolate reflection, stripping
bare the impossibility of the function, the irony of
the unlikely as a critique of consumerism and the
transference to corporealness.
A first phase that summed up the projects and the
thoughts of that period was also provided by the
exhibition Alchimia 1977-1987 (Turin 1986): in the
introduction to the catalogue Franois Burkhardt
emphasized Mendinis crucial influence on the
radical changes that took place in the various
design sectors, from architecture to interior design
to graphics his role as experimental laboratory
has compelled the professional world to come to

Lass, monument for Vitra in

Kreisel Zollfreie Strasse, Otterbach,
Nimm Platz in Weil Am Rhein,
Germany, 2000

terms with the postmodern environment in which

it lives, and to look for answers reading therein a
possible exit route from the current conflict between
modernity and post-modernity.
Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that Mendinis
position vis--vis the project did not meet with
immediate critical success; actually, institutional
architectural culture circumscribed the scope of
the Radical experience, and the following one of
postmodernism, to a transitory fact of dubious interpretation, as expressed, for example, in Il Disegno
del Prodotto Industriale (1982) by Vittorio Gregotti,
where the events of the neo-avant-gardes are substantially relegated to the short chapter, written by
Giampiero Bosoni, called Monumentalizzazione e
Distruzione dellOggetto. It was Andrea Branzi, in
the book La Casa Calda (1984), who, in an inverted
key, reviewed the history of an other design, one

that sank its roots into the artistic craftsmanship

that preceded the Industrial Revolution and that,
because it did not identify with the univocal tradition
of Industrial Design, welcomed Mendini (along with
Sottsass and Pesce) among the protagonists of the
new Italian design, aimed at the recomposing
of a possible domestic culture, that is to say, the
reconstruction of a system of links and functions that
were not exhausted in ergonomic and functional
relationships, but were more broadly cultural and
expressive, between man and the objects of his
own domestic habitat.
The notion was also discussed by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio in the introduction to Atelier Mendini: una
utopia visiva (1994), where Mendinis working method is likened to the tradition of the Neo-medieval
communities of Arts and Crafts in the style of William
Morris, or of the Case dArte of Italian Futurism; with

115

Atelier Mendini Milan,

Alessandro and Francesco
Mendinis studio, opened
in 1989

the difference, however, that while in those cases

the avant-gardes posed as an elite that descended
upon society from above, Mendini implements a
reverse operation,starting from reality, from the low
one of kitsch culture [] that before everything
else can be communicated to everyone and for
everyone, thus marking a fundamental passage
from the aesthetics of experimentation, so dear
to the avant-garde groups and to modernity, to
that of the communication of post-modernity.The
success of Radical Designs image and above all
of the productivist turnaround that took place in
the 1980s is reflected in the dissemination of Mendinis work to the rest of the world, as witnessed by
Michael Collins essay Towards Post-Modernism
(1987), in which the architects name is linked to
his theory of the banal object and related to the
work he was doing for Alessi at the time. A more
substantial contribution to the reading of his work
was offered by Peter Wei, who, in the monograph
Alessandro Mendini. Cose, progetti, costruzioni
(2001) investigated the multiple aspects of Mendinis
work as it relates to art, industry and architecture:
Mendini, he wrote, amalgamates architecture,
design and painting in one cosmos that, through
its forms, ideas, philosophical theories and its function as ritual fetish, tries to penetrate the world of
our sentiments. Starting from painting, the forms
and the colours are transformed into decorative
elements.The pictorial decoration covers and gives
shape to the interiors, to the design products and
to the architecture. Mendinis permanent creative
methodology not only produces a conspicuous
and superficial variation of the decor, but it also
evokes the tragedy, the comedy and the drama
inherent in the objects themselves.
Mendinis role is projected on a much broader
scale as compared with what is usually reserved
for the protagonists of a single discipline, going so
far as to coincide with the image of a theoretician
of culture: Mendini cannot be simply defined as a
typical representative of Italian design; rather, he is as
an artist who moves along the boundary between

116

related design cultures even if, in some respects,

they are completely different from one another.
Mendini belongs to the Italian humanist culture,
but he uses a formal international language that
exerts an influence, on an international level, on the
figurative arts, architecture and design. Mendinis
representation as an artist, albeit supported by
constant and programmatic relationships with
painters and sculptors, in the 1990s became a
sort of interpretative stereotype, besides being the
leitmotif of a great deal of the more exegetic or
consensual rather than truly critical literature. Not
even Franz Haks among other things, his interlocutor
for Groninger Museum distances himself from this
common belief, underscoring a fundamental aspect
of Mendinis position, i.e. that of having been able
to extend the scope of art though his collaboration
with industry and his contribution to entertainment
shopping. By pushing the paradox of the reference
to Walter Benjamin and to his celebrated notion
of art in the era of technical reproducibility, Haks
thus suggested also envisioning in Mendinis project
perspective his contribution to the structure of the
postmodernist cultural magazine:As early as 1987
Mendini showed how important and attractive
advertising in magazines can be: isnt this also a
form of contemporary art within everyones reach,
right there at the newsagents on the corner?
Emilio Ambaszs portrait of Mendini is, nonetheless,
perhaps the most penetrating and least rhetorical
of the artist as intellectual, expressed with the customary formula of the fairy tale. Mendini, the
Argentinian architect and designer wrote,has not
just been the creator of many objects, but also a
cultural thinker and an intellectual who has created new forms, commenting critically on his social
condition and making aesthetic references to the
deterioration of mass culture that the industry of
the Twice-Modern Empire had generated. Mendinis
uniqueness consists in expressing himself as an
ethical hero who, in an apparently contradictory
way, suggests ideas and images without a moralistic content.

Selected
References

118

P. Navone, B. Orlandoni,Architettura radicale, Documenti di Casabella, Milan: G. Milani Editrice, 1974.

F. Irace, Assenza-Presenza, Bologna: DAuria Editore, 1978.
B. Radice (ed.), Elogio del Banale, Milan: Studio Forma Alchimia, 1980.
P. M. Rinaldi (ed.), Mobile Infinito, Milan: Alchimia Editore, 1981.
Studio Alchimia, Bauhaus collection 1980-1981, Milan: Alchimia Editore, 1981.
V. Gregotti, Il disegno del prodotto industriale. Italia 1860-1980, Milan: Mondadori Electa, 1982.
A. Branzi, La casa calda, Milan: Idea Books, 1984.
G. Sambonet, Alchimia, 1977-1987, introduction by F. Burkhardt, Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1986.
M. Collins, Towards Post-modernism. Design Since 1851, London: British Museum Publications, 1987.
Alessandro Mendini, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989.
S. Casciani, G. Di Pietrantonio (eds.), Design in Italia (1950-1990), Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1991.
R. Poletti (ed.), Atelier Mendini: una utopia visiva, Milan: Fabbri Editori, 1994.
P. Wei (ed.), Alessandro Mendini. Cose, progetti, costruzioni, Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2001.
T. Huiming, Alessandro Mendini, Pioneer of Postmodern Design in Italy, Guangzhou: Guangzhou
Academy of Fine Arts, 2004.
B. Finessi, Mendini, Mantua: Edizioni Corraini, 2009.
A. Fiz (ed.) Mendini. Alchimie. Dal Controdesign alla Nuove Utopie, exh. cat.,
Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2010.
Books and essays by Alessandro Mendini
L. Parmesani (ed.), Alessandro Mendini. Scritti, Fondazione Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea, Milan:
Skira, 2004.
S. Annicchiarico (ed.), Pulviscoli. 2469 disegni di Alessandro Mendini. Collezione permanente del
Design Italiano, Triennale di Milano, Milan: Charta, 2005.
A. Mendini ed.), Quali cose siamo, exh. cat., Triennale Design Museum, Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2010.
Domus, editorials from no. 935 April 2010 to no. 945 March 2011.

119

Picture Credits
For all the images related to the work of Alessandro Mendini,
Atelier Mendini, Milan.
Atelier Mendini wishes to thank all the photographers
who have taken pictures over the years, and especially:
Bergamo & Basso / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 21
Riccardo Bianchi / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 8, 9, 10-11
Mauro Davoli / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 12-13, 50, 69
Ramak Fazel / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 31
Alberto Ferrero / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 7, 53, 86-87
Giacomo Giannini / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 82, 83
Carlo Lavatori / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 27, 48-49, 54-55, 105
Salvatore Licitra / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 65, 66
Marisa Montibeller / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 100
Studio Ombra / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 75
Flavio Pannocchia / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 41
Ralph Richter / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 60-61
Beba Stoppani / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 113
Emilio Tremolada / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 18-19, 73, 117
Matteo Tresoldi / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 55 right
Tom Vack / Atelier Mendini, Milan: 78, 79, 80
Courtesy of Cartier: 97, 98
Courtesy of Casabella: 23, 38
Courtesy of The Swatch Group Italy: 76, 77
Copyright holders may contact the Publisher regarding
any omissions in iconographic sources, and/or citations
whose original source could not be located.

Alessandro Mendini was born in Milan in 1931.

In the 1970s he was one of the leading figures
in the avant-garde movement of Radical
Design, while in the 1980s he was one of the
founding fathers of Italian Neo-Modern Design.
Today he is considered a world-class designer.
He has directed such prestigious periodicals
as Casabella (1970-1976), MODO (1977-1981),
and Domus (1980-1985, 2010). In 1989 he and
his brother Francesco opened Atelier Mendini
in Milan. In addition to his personal research
into design, he also collaborates with important
companies both in Italy and abroad, including
Zanotta, Alessi, Swatch, Philips, Venini, Bisazza
and Cartier. His objects are held in museums
across the world, including the MoMA in New
York, the Beaubourg in Paris, the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Denver, and the Vitra
Museum in Weil am Rhein.
Graziella Leyla Ciag She is a researcher
in the field of the History of Architecture and
holds an untenured post as professor of History
of the Arts, Design and Architecture at the Milan
Polytechnics INDACO Department and School
of Design. She has authored texts on the history
of design and modern and contemporary
architecture, and curated exhibitions on the
same subjects, with particular attention to
the problems relating to the conservation
and valorization of cultural heritage.