Mario Bellini

His contribution to Olivetti's Programma 101, released in 1965, placed him at the center of one of the twentieth century's most consequential design objects. The Programma 101 is widely regarded as the first commercially available desktop computer, and Bellini's casing gave a futuristic yet usable form to engineering that had no real precedent. The work established his reputation for finding the right outer language for complex inner systems.

Furniture became the arena where that ability produced its most enduring results. The Amanta seating system for C&B Italia, designed in 1966, was among the earliest truly modular upholstered concepts: independent foam blocks that could be combined and reconfigured without constraint. Six years later came Le Bambole for the same manufacturer, by then renamed B&B Italia. The name means dolls in Italian, and the piece earned it, being an entirely soft form where polyurethane foam of varying densities replaced the traditional rigid frame. A truck-tarpaulin fabric covering, stitched along structural ribs, held the piece together while contributing to its tactile, almost body-like quality. Le Bambole won the Compasso d'Oro in 1979 and remains one of the defining objects of 1970s Italian design.

The Cab chair for Cassina, designed in 1977, approached the problem from the opposite direction. Where Le Bambole dissolved the frame, Cab kept it and made the leather do everything else. Sixteen hand-stitched panels of saddle leather zip around a steel armature, acting simultaneously as upholstery, padding, and structural skin. The construction is as simple to describe as it is difficult to achieve, and more than 400,000 copies have been sold.

From 1968 to 1991 Bellini edited Domus, the Milan-based architecture and design monthly, giving him a platform to shape broader conversations about the discipline. In 1987, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective devoted entirely to his work, the first such exhibition the museum had ever organized for a living designer. Twenty-five of his pieces are held in MoMA's permanent collection. The Compasso d'Oro has been awarded to him eight times.

From the 1980s onward, Bellini concentrated increasingly on architecture at large scale: the New Milan Convention Centre, the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Japan, an expansion of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre in Paris, completed in 2012.

At auction, Bellini's furniture commands consistent interest across European houses. The Le Bambole sofa has reached 21,448 EUR at Pandolfini, while Cab 414 armchairs and Amanta configurations from C&B Italia appear regularly at SAV Köln and Hamburg. Early production examples from the late 1960s and first-edition Le Bambole pieces attract the strongest results, particularly when retaining original upholstery.