Designer, Critic, and Architect Alessandro Mendini Dies at 87

Italian architect and designer Alessandro Mendini bucked the rigid rules of modernism, embracing bold colors, decoration, and the Radical Design movement of the ’60s.

Mendini is perhaps best known for his Proust Chair, designed with French author Marcel Proust in mind. The chair features a Baroque-style shape covered in hundreds of pointillist dots—and this combination of historical styles paved the way for the birth of the postmodernist movement. 

"This chair is very expensive. It has no function. It's only for amusement," Mendini said in an interview in 2015. "But pointillism is a real theory. Because if each point is good, the whole object is good."

"Mendini is the nihilistic, cynical conceptualist," said Glenn Adamson, curator of the 2011 Postmodernist exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The show featured a slideshow of Mendini's "Destruction of Lassu chair, 1974," where he ceremoniously destroyed a miniature chair he designed, setting it on fire in a quarry in Milan.

Mendini was also a celebrated architect, graduating from the Politecnico di Milano in 1959. He set up practice with his brother Francesco in 1989 and ran their company, Atelier Mendini, right up until his death. 

Some of his best-known projects are the Groninger Museum in The Netherlands and the Alessi residence in Omenga. In his design work, many will recognize the signature Alessi Anna G. corkscrew, which features a figure of a playful, smiling woman. Mendini was the design director of his friend Alberto Alessi's Italian housewares company for 30 years.

The architect and designer also worked as a journalist, editing design magazines Casabella (1970 to 1976), Modo (1977), and Domus (1979 to 1985, and 2010). With these platforms, he was able to espouse the ideology to compliment the postmodern movement he championed. As co-founder of Domus Academy, a leading postgraduate fashion and design school in Milan, he also looked to ensure its future.

Mendini's time as the editor of Domus also coincided with his co-founding of Studio Alchimia, a design group he and his friend Ettore Sottsass Jr formed with the mission of "materializing a non-existent thing into being."

Iconic Pieces by Alessandro Mendini We Love

Photo of Alessandro Mendini by L4red0. Photos of Groninger by Rob Koster and Wutsje.