The World of Alessandro Mendini
By: Laura May Todd
Photo: Igor Zacharov, Kryštof Jankovec
Forward-thinking designer
The Milanese designer, architect and writer first took up residence in his via Sannio atelier in 1989. At the time it was considered the periphery of Milan, an industrial zone bordering the city limits where Mendini and his brother Francesco, who ran the studio together, could have free rein to develop the smorgasbord of projects that made the for7mer a pivotal figure in the canon of 20th century Italian design. Even then, Mendini was regarded as one of the most forward-thinking designers to emerge from Milan: a radical thinker whose objects, buildings and, most of all, ideas deeply influenced the generations that came after him.
Colourful Rombo vase
When Mendini passed away in 2019 at 87 his daughters Fulvia and Elisa were determined to keep his legacy alive. The via Sannio studio still operates as a design office, producing faithful re-editions from his sprawling catalog of work, which recently included a brand new colourway for his Rombo vase, an anthropomorphic vessel in the shape of a face first shown at Lasvit’s Monsters exhibition at the Salone del Mobile in 2018 where it won the Milan De¬sign Award.
The distorted visage of the hand-wrought coloured glass vessel is an homage to Czech Cubism, a particular interest of Mendini’s, and features a symmetrical head seemingly split into two faces peering in different directions, with two eyes, two noses and two red vertical slashes for the mouth. The project, one of Mendini’s last, is a microcosm of all he stood for throughout his six-decade-long career.
Inside the studio
Mendini grew up on the opposite side of town than his current studio with jumbled mix of patterns and prototypes, with colourful prints hanging from the walls and objects assembled on every available surface, in a palazzo on via Jan designed by famed architect Piero Portoluppi, an architectural marvel in the Art Deco style his grandfather had commissioned to house his extended family… Read more in the print issue.
