Alessandro Mendini, one of Italy’s most influential and exuberant designers, died at home in Milan Monday afternoon. He was 87.
A staunch exponent of the Italian Radical Design movement, Mendini practiced on the front line of what would become the dominant aesthetic of the 1970s and ‘80s. Over the course of more than half a century, Mendini juggled a multihyphenate career spanning architecture, design, and criticism, and designed everything from flamboyant bottle openers to museums.
Through his work, Mendini rejoiced in the decorative, the jubilant, the quotidian, and (to many a pure modernist) the profane. As he told Architectural Digest in an interview last year, “I think that besides being functional, an object must have a soul and express friendliness.”
Mendini was born in 1931 to a well-to-do Milanese family. In his own telling, Mendini was destined to design: As newborns, he and his twin sister were nestled alongside hot water bottles in a Piero Portaluppi armchair.
At the urging of his parents, Mendini enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, where he received a degree in architecture in 1959. It was a period rife with revolutionary new design ideas as the country grappled with the aftermath of World War II.
In 1976, after a period working for industrial designer and architect Marcello Nizzoli, Mendini established Studio Alchimia, an avant-garde multidisciplinary group that worked across architecture, industrial design, and performance. Its notable members included Alessandro Guerriero, Andrea Branzi, and Ettore Sottsass (Sottssas would later break from Studio Alchimia to form the influential Memphis Group). During this period, Mendini also served as the editor of publications including Casabella and Domus where these new Postmodern ideas were both disseminated and critiqued.
Mendini designed some of the most iconic works of the period—many of which took historical references and turned them upside down. His best known work, the Proust chair, created in the late 1970s, references both 19th-century Baroque furnishings and the paintings of Paul Signac. But here, the artist’s Pointillist brushstrokes are blown up into polychromatic confetti. In Mendini’s world, “furnishing becomes the theater of private life,” as he told the Italian magazine Arbitare in 1998.
Mendini’s buildings were no less dramatic. In 1989, with his brother Francesco, he opened Atelier Mendini in Milan. The duo perhaps became best known for the canary-yellow tower of the Groninger Museum campus in the Netherlands (1994), a collaboration with Philippe Starck, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Michele de Lucchi. Through this genre of architecture, “we want to give feelings,” the brothers wrote on the studio’s website.
Mendini spent his later years in the Italian countryside in a house that, as the designer told AD in the 2018 interview, “detaches me for a few days from the speed of life and work.”
Indeed, even as the designer reached his 80s he continued to hit the gas—a testament both to his enduring work ethic and to renewed interest in Italian Radical Design. In 2016, the designer collaborated with the skatewear brand Supreme on a series of limited-edition apparel, ceramic trays, and skate decks. Last year, he designed a cheeky stainless-steel egg pan for Alessi—a company with whom he had collaborated since the late 1970s.
Recalls Alberto Alessi, a longtime client and friend: “Sandro was always there, in the little upstairs office of Atelier Mendini on Via Sannio, always willing to lend an ear and offer his precious, sometimes enigmatic opinion.... Alessandro was a friend who stood by me when times were tough, a kind and rigorous mentor from whom I learned many things—practically the architect I trusted the most.”
