“I’m totally in awe of him,” says Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “He’s so subtle, so innovative, and quite brilliant at crystallizing ideas, although he has never been as well known to the general public as designers like Castiglioni and Sottsass, even in Italy, because he’s at his best working behind the scenes.”
Mendini’s penchant for discretion has made him one of the design world’s well-kept secrets. Aficionados may know that he edited Domus before, during the early Eighties, as well as two other important Italian design magazines, Casabella and Modo. They’ll know too that he was at the heart of Italy’s radical design movement in the Sixties and Seventies and, later, postmodernism. But even if you’ve never heard of Alessandro Mendini, you’re bound to have been affected by his work.
That’s because our lives would be different without him. Mendini has influenced the creation of objects and spaces through his own projects, but his work as a writer, editor, and curator has also had an enormous impact on other designers and architects. The vision he has championed for years—a humane, sensitive, thoughtful, empowering, intellectually rich discipline that’s about ideas, not styling—seems increasingly relevant. It has a special resonance for young designers, who are concerned with cracking environmental problems and imbuing industrial pieces with meaning rather than flipping vertiginously expensive chairs at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
Mendini has an additional role, as one of the last surviving design maestri, as Italians call the “masters” who made their country the global center of design in the late 20th century. Thanks to “Quali Cose Siamo,” he has moved center stage at a time when Italian design is reasserting itself internationally, with the opening in Manhattan in late September of an American outpost of the Triennale in the space formerly occupied by the American Craft Museum, directly opposite MoMA. The inaugural show will be an homage to Mendini’s own design hero, Giò Ponti, the man he succeeded at Domus. (Mendini paid tribute to Ponti by including one of his paintings in “Quali Cose Siamo.”)
Mention that you’re meeting Mendini, and you’ll invariably be told that he’s very clever, very charming, and very short, with very blue eyes. Quite right. Sitting in the conference room suspended above his open-plan studio, the architect looks impressively lithe, with a light tan and cropped white hair. He stares at you intently through circular wire-framed glasses but rarely ends a sentence without smiling.
“He’s incredibly pleasant to work with, radiating calm and tranquillity,” observes Joseph Grima, who recently left his position as director of Storefront, a nonprofit architecture organization in New York, and moved to Milan to work on Domus’s website; he will take over the magazine from Mendini in February. “He’s also incredibly sharp, one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever worked with, and so open. There’s always a twinkle in his eye.”
