At the Groninger Museum, the exhibition 'Mondo Mendini' celebrates Alessandro Mendini, the recently deceased architect and intellectual of great international standing.
Considered the last master of an unsurpassed generation of Italian creative production, Alessandro Mendini, born in 1931, exerted an enormous influence on aesthetic trends in design at an international level too, with works ranging from architecture to industrial design, from one-off pieces to art, from performances to theoretical writings. He directed the magazines Modo, Casabella, Domus and Ollo, and created avant-garde design groups, from the Radicals in the 1970s to Alchimia in the 1980s, working for the most celebrated design brands and expressing his thinking on the social and political role of designers in his field. His intellectual legacy is enormous: among architects and designers of my generation and those that followed, he leaves a great void.
The Groninger Museum, in the Netherlands, designed twenty-five years ago by Alessandro Mendini, celebrates him from 12 October 2019 to 5 May 2020 with the major exhibition 'Mondo Mendini-The world of Alessandro Mendini'.
During the years of Mendini's editorship, the magazine Domus was effectively a point of reference and a catalyst for the energies animating the leading figures of design and architecture, alongside those of Italy's most forward-thinking companies, all coming together to give rise to innovative ideas and projects. Chief among them were Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis movement, Alessandro Guerriero of Studio Alchimia and Andrea Branzi, first director of the nascent design school Domus academy, around whom dozens of young architects and designers fresh out of university gathered, with boundless enthusiasm and an unparalleled desire for the new. In this effervescent climate, from 1979 to 1986 I worked with Alessandro Mendini on the editorial staff of Domus, collaborating with him on several projects — from installations with Studio Alchimia such as Robot sentimentale for the company Mim, to the exhibition Arte, moda, design at the Museo di Prato. Those were years of intense professional experience and a high degree of experimentation. Personally, I regard Mendini as a mentor and master of great human, as well as professional, qualities.
From my first collaboration on his book Paesaggio casalingo, which traces the history of the company Alessi, to the subsequent exhibition held at the Triennale di Milano that illustrated the emblematic history of metal household objects, my work with him on this theme developed throughout the 1980s through a series of projects. Among these was Tea&coffee piazza, which brought in well-known international architects such as Paolo Portoghesi, Arata Isozaki, Michael Graves, Charles Jencks, Aldo Rossi and Richard Meier to redesign a tea and coffee service — a symbol of bourgeois ritual — reinterpreted in a contemporary key; and also studies and research projects such as Ricerca sul decoro, an initial mapping of the decoration of everyday environments and artificial materials, promoted by Editoriale Domus and the companies Abet Laminati, Fiat, Zanotta and Alessi.
For Mendini, the ethical and social implications of the profession of architect and designer were clear. "One should try, in as precise and as profound a way as possible, to choose one's own way of working according to one's specific abilities," he states in the interview I conducted for the magazine Collectible Dry (volume 2, 2016). "And ethics should be at the foundation of our profession. I would say to young people or old, to anyone, today: don't be an opportunist, but try in as precise and as profound a way as possible to make this choice."
The designer's profession is built on an ethical commitment and a holistic approach. On this subject, in a video interview recorded on the occasion of the exhibition The Italian way of seating at Sydney, Australia, which I curated together with Maria Clelia Mazzanti in 2009, Mendini says: "Zygmunt Bauman speaks to us today of 'liquid society', of a society in which professions intermingle, intertwine and lose their historical identity, becoming 'infra-professions' devoid of any visible identity — a fact certainly amplified by our constant referencing of the virtual world. This may be seen as positive by some, negative by others. From my point of view, the loss of conceptual solidity in the professions is a negative thing. The sense of responsibility is undermined: when everything flows and nothing stops, responsibility dissolves. Perhaps a possible space for a moment of renewed commitment can be found in a holistic approach to design and to one's social sphere. In the sense that, in a world of war, violence and widespread malice, the professions must rediscover the need to be moral. And this applies both to the content and to the manner in which one practises one's profession."
Alongside the Anna G corkscrew produced by Alessi — which has become an object-character in the history of design — the Proust armchair, a classic Baroque-style armchair painted like a pointillist canvas, is Mendini's most celebrated and acclaimed object. On its appearance, it generated such media success that it projected Mendini, then newly appointed director of Domus, onto the international scene as an artist, architect and designer.
"We met in 1978, when Mendini came to my studio with Alessandro Guerriero of Alchimia," recounts Prospero Rasulo, the artist-designer who painted it, describing its genesis. "We experimented with decoration using my 'episcopio' (a particular type of enlarger that few people had at the time, ed.), projecting Impressionist paintings by Signac and Seurat onto the armchair to achieve a 'perceptual displacement', from the formidable visual effect produced by the pointillist mark. I painted it that way, and the result we obtained was truly exceptional." This first Proust armchair was presented at the Biennale di Venezia in the exhibition Stanza del XX secolo, signed by Mendini with the collaboration of Rasulo and Pierantonio Volpini. Subsequently reproduced in numerous examples — around eighty painted by hand, with the supervision of Atelier Mendini — it was also produced in later years in fabric by the company Cappellini and in plastic by Magis.
Mendini wrote, analysed and designed around the theme of the home throughout his long professional life. A little-known episode reveals just how intimate, fragile, delicate, profound and complex his relationship was with his own home — a place of memory, built up through the progressive layering of objects, signs, recollections and presences.
Mendini asked Giacomo Giannini — an imaginative author and interpreter of reality rather than a photographer in the traditional sense of the word, known for his particular experimental approach to visual languages — to produce a series of images of the home. From this encounter a unique and special project was born, the fruit of a private dialogue between the two: Giannini stayed at different times, alone or with his family, in Mendini's home in order to live it in its everyday dimension, explore it in depth and come to know it intimately in all its most secret aspects. The aim was to capture and fix in images the essence of inhabited and lived-in architecture, going beyond the dimension of the classic photographic reportage.
Mendini loved to draw ceaselessly: his "written" maps are famous, having become icons and been widely imitated, as are his "stilemi" — true recurring marks that became identifying and distinctive signs of the author's mode of representation. With Studio Alchimia he created an abacus of decorative stilemi applied in different versions to his design products, the subjects of his paintings, and present in the façades and decorative elements of his architecture.
In 2015 he made a collection of monster drawings, 26 in total. "I have done so many projects, of all kinds, large, small, industrial, one-off pieces, forms, art, and every now and then I have nightmares about many of the things I have made. I believe I have also made quite a few mistakes," was his reply when I asked him, in the interview mentioned earlier, whether there was anything among his projects that he would rather not have done or that he had not liked. "I come to terms with my nightmares! And perhaps that is why I enjoy drawing monsters."
On the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary and in honour of its designer Alessandro Mendini, the Groninger Museum presents the exhibition 'Mondo Mendini-The World of Alessandro Mendini', conceived by Mendini himself, to whom the museum had given carte blanche to tell his own story. A kind of intellectual testament from which emerges the great creative force expressed throughout his entire professional history. On show are not only his own works, but also those of artists with whom he felt an elective affinity, for a total of over 200 objects and works: from Paul Signac to Wassily Kandinsky, from Henri Matisse to Oskar Schlemmer, the architectural projects of Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld, objects conceived by Italian designers such as Gio Ponti, Michele De Lucchi and Gaetano Pesce, and the recent paintings of American artist Peter Halley.
The exhibition's display is spectacular, with large-scale sculptural works set against the equally striking backdrop of the museum, inaugurated in 1984 — an architecture that Mendini had conceived together with other authors — Michele De Lucchi, Philippe Starck, Coop Himmelblau — invited to contribute to certain parts of the building.
Exhibition 'Mondo Mendini', Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands. From 12 October 2019 to 5 May 2020. Ticket €15, students €10