There are very few, very small spaces between the artfully arranged books, vases, busts, plates, figurines, sketches, paintings, shells, bird’s nests, and other items sitting so elegantly on every surface of designer and architect Alessandro Mendini’s apartment, but he stares forlornly at each of the gaps. “So much is missing,” he says with a sigh, before chuckling. “Though I do know where it is.”
That would be at the Design Museum of the Triennale, the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, where Mendini has curated a blockbuster show, “Quali Cose Siamo,” which translates as “The Things We Are.” It consists of what he calls “an anthropological collection” of 800 objects chosen not on the conventional design criteria of what they do or how they look but because, he believes, they tell us what it is like to be Italian. “It’s sort of a personal museum, or a Fellini play, of my vision of Italy,” Mendini explains. All of the exhibits, including the missing loot from his apartment, are jumbled together as if at a flea market: historic and contemporary, expensive and cheap, practical and extravagant.
Among them (although a list doesn’t come close to conveying the ambition and eccentricity of Mendini’s selection) are a giant Campari bottle; pieces of pasta; a Giorgio Morandi still life; the original models of E.T.; an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter; a huge Ferragamo shoe; rubble from the 2009 earthquake, which devastated the city of L’Aquila; a replica of Michelangelo’s David; a patchwork jacket worn by the late designer Achille Castiglioni; and a nude portrait of another, Ettore Sottsass.
“It’s just fantastic,” says Australian designer Marc Newson. “Seeing that show is like looking into Mendini’s mind, which is an incredible experience because he’s so humorous, sprightly, and generous. He has such a deep knowledge and understanding of design, and the show reflects that, but it’s also quirky, insightful, and playful. He sees the fun in design, and the poetry.”
Newson isn’t the only fan of the exhibition, which runs through February 2011 and has been packed with visitors since it opened in March, a few weeks before the design world flocked to Milan for the annual Furniture Fair. “I told everyone I could that it would have been better to have canceled the rest of the fair and just held Mendini’s show,” says British designer Jasper Morrison. “It blows away the constricting frontiers of what is generally thought of as design and frees up our thinking about it.”
As if that weren’t enough, Mendini has taken the helm of Domus, the influential design magazine, for a year. He’s also curating an exhibition on Italian craftsmanship, which opens in Verona in September, and completing projects at Atelier Mendini, the architecture practice he runs in Milan with his younger brother, Francesco, including the completion of a vast pavilion for the World Design Capital festival, to be held in South Korea this year. Oh, and he’ll turn 80 next year.
