Typical was his critique of Lasting Void, a resin and fiberglass seat cast inside the cavity of a dead cow by the young German designer Julia Lohmann. Her objective was to force people to confront the exploitation of animals by industry, but Mendini saw the piece as unnecessarily cruel and trite. He said so in a letter, which was published in several design magazines in 2007 alongside Lohmann’s response. After reading her explanation, he e-mailed her saying he had changed his mind, and hugged her when he saw her in Milan the following year. “The meeting was quite emotional,” Lohmann recalls. “The letter from him was a very good challenge for me. It helped me to clarify my position by questioning myself more thoroughly.”
Prolific though he has always been, Mendini remained largely out of the limelight until this spring, when the opening of “Quali Cose Siamo” coincided with his return to Domus. His second stint there has been as iconoclastic as the first but for very different reasons. During his first editorship, Domus was thrilling and audacious; now it is studiedly quiet and calm, in stark contrast to the hysteria with which other magazines are responding to the digital threat.
“This time his Domus is very dignified, very rarefied, quite meditative,” says Grima. “It looks back to his Domus of the Eighties, and the early Domus of the Thirties. The typeface he chose is Futura, which is typical of Italian graphic design in that period. His editorial is in the form of a diary, the thoughts of the moment, which are articulated throughout the magazine. That’s the only consideration for him. He would never sacrifice it to chase exclusives.”
The new Domus covers are delicate portraits drawn by graphic artist Lorenzo Mattotti. A recent cover star was Sigmund Freud, used to illustrate a piece on what Mendini calls the “psychological interiors” of his study in Vienna, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s home there, and the House of Glass designed by French architect Pierre Chareau in Paris. “At this point I am interested in thinking more deeply about the future, beauty, and quality,” he explains. “Editing Domus for a year is an opportunity to do that.”
When asked what interests him in contemporary design and architecture, he winces. “I find it completely impossible to answer that question,” he says before citing the “highly aestheticized minimalism” of French product designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and British architect David Chipperfield. He’s also intrigued by the Green School, a progressive educational facility in Indonesia that was built—and is constantly rebuilt—from locally grown bamboo.
Once the year at Domus is over, he plans to devote more time to writing, curating, drawing, and design. “I’m just not capable of concentrating on one thing—Ponti was the same,” says Mendini. “You know, I’ve been a pessimist my whole life, but now I’m optimistic. The world is so violent that I feel it’s my responsibility to find something positive. At my age optimism is essential.”
