DesignerItalianb.1931–d.2019
Alessandro Mendini
4 active items
Alessandro Mendini was born in Milan on 16 August 1931 and studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, graduating in 1959. His early professional years were spent working with Marcello Nizzoli, but by the late 1960s he had moved away from conventional architectural practice toward the expanding terrain of design criticism and theory.
In 1970 he became editor-in-chief of Casabella, one of Italy's leading architecture journals, where he positioned himself as a theorist of Radical Design - a movement that rejected the functionalist orthodoxies of postwar modernism and sought to charge objects with cultural and symbolic meaning. He was among the founding members of Global Tools, an experimental collective set up in 1973 that used workshops to explore the relationship between design, craft, and everyday life.
His association with Studio Alchimia from 1978 onward was the most productive period of his early design work. Alongside Ettore Sottsass and Michele De Lucchi, he developed what became known as Re-Design - the practice of taking existing, often banal objects and reinventing them through new surface treatments, decoration, and conceptual framing. The most enduring result of this period is the Poltrona di Proust (1978), a neo-baroque armchair painted with a hand-applied pointillist pattern inspired by Paul Signac. The piece was conceived as a meditation on sensory experience and literary memory, and it has since been produced in editions by Cappellini and Magis, and is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He served as editor-in-chief of Domus from 1979 to 1985 and co-founded Domus Academy in 1982, a postgraduate design school in Milan that became an important platform for international design education. From 1989 he ran Atelier Mendini with his brother Francesco, through which he took on major architectural commissions: the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands (1994), the casino in Arosa, Switzerland, and a memorial tower in Hiroshima. The Groninger Museum, with its tower designed in collaboration with Coop Himmelblau, Philippe Starck, and Michele De Lucchi, became one of the most-discussed examples of postmodern architecture in Europe. He also maintained a long and fruitful collaboration with Alessi, designing the Anna G. corkscrew (1994) and numerous other domestic objects that brought his decorative language into wide circulation.
Mendini received the Compasso d'Oro three times: in 1979 for his editorial direction of Modo magazine, in 1981 for the Ricerca sul decoro project with Studio Alchimia, and in 2014 as a lifetime achievement award. He died in Milan on 18 February 2019.
On the Auctionist platform, Mendini's work appears across furniture, glass, and decorative objects. Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen in Munich handles the largest share of his auction appearances, followed by Hagelstam in Helsinki, Pandolfini in Florence, and Crafoord Auktioner in Stockholm. The 4 currently active lots sit alongside 15 concluded sales. The highest results are two works from 1975 - a Spaziale chair and a Spaziale table - each achieving 30,000 EUR. A signed Venini glass vase achieved 5,393 SEK, while a pair of Proust armchairs for Magis sold for 4,000 EUR. The range reflects the breadth of his output: from one-off design pieces at five figures to widely produced serial objects at accessible prices.