During the hot summer of 2011, stepping into the Atelier Mendini was like being ushered into the workshop of a happy alchemist who, together with his beloved boys, enjoys reconstructing the forms of the imagination in the spirit of the Renaissance workshop, where the sum of skills created the excellence of the manufactured article. Alessandro Mendini is a source of ideas and his gaze is always projected into the future.
This precious record of a master of 20th century creativity is republished on the occasion of the major retrospective “Io sono un drago. La vera storia di Alessandro Mendini” produced with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and set up at the Milan Triennale until 13 October 2024. It presents 400 works divided into different thematic sections, bringing together works in various formats, materials and subjects, from public and private collections, that tell the story of his research as a designer and artist that lives and feeds on incessant aesthetic, emotional and cultural overlaps, as he poetically emphasises: “Progressively I have become more and more attached to my memory. If we look at it we find a labyrinth crossed by ‘goings’ and ‘come-backs’, finally ending up in a dead end from which we have no alternative but to go back, and then, if anything, to dig up a memory like that of a window of a Romanesque church we visited fifteen years ago”.
As Atelier Mendini, you define your work as a continuous flow of feelings, images, ideas, a jigsaw puzzle in the making, where the achievement of synthesis is a utopian goal, but one that is fundamental to the continuous search for ever more perfect and contradictory dimensions, a persistent and eternal progression towards the impossibility of achieving perfection. Is this the element that defines Atelier Mendini?
In the work that we do, that I do, there is a kind of diversification of themes and interests, because we are involved in very, very different, even conflicting types of work, such as a house rather than a decoration or a sculpture or images for a site, so the approach is mentally eclectic, as if based not on centripetal forces but on centrifugal forces in the process of expansion. This is scattered and tiring, because if we want to work carefully on the individual activities, each of them is a discipline and therefore has techniques and rules that must be perfectly mastered. This is the case with materials, for example, because working with blown glass, carbon fibre or reconstituted wood, and at the same time achieving satisfactory and precise results within these different materials, necessarily requires a background of specialisation. Our way of working is therefore both amateurish – because it is open to different experiences – and regulated by rules that we have to know and for which we very often rely on outside help. Not everything is created and realised in the studio, but there are objects for which we also use various external collaborators. This also applies to the creative aspect, which I don’t expect to be completed in my own head or within my working group, but rather in a kind of ping-pong with other well-known or completely unknown authors.
In the word workshop itself there is an attempt at chorality, which implies a kind of craftsmanship, a workshop-like way of working, to which I am particularly attached. That is why I believe that the number of professionals who can easily interact, work and talk every moment, beyond hierarchies, should never exceed 12-15 people, because if the group grows, it becomes hierarchical and therefore much more difficult to manage. So here we have the chat, which seems to me to be a fundamental method of generating ideas.
If we talk about the codes I have always liked and been interested in, they are mainly those of painting, as opposed to those of design or architecture, and in particular those of artists such as Savinio, Carrà, Depero, or movements such as Cubism or Prague Cubism, but always with a mental and emotional core of a person born here, in Milan, at a time when culture existed and was created by these people, which still resists and lives in me. I also pay particular attention to the romantic aspect of design, which means expressionism, anthroposophy and therefore Rudolf Steiner and, as an architect, Erich Mendelsohn and Antoni Gaudì, with whom I have often been associated. Another aspect is that of cooler but more energetic languages, such as those of the Futurists. So all these elements, linked to the word ‘workshop’ and linked to the Renaissance workshop, are the elements that, in my opinion, give the most important and fundamental values to Italian design and that, apart from me, we find in Gio Ponti and Ignazio Gardella, Carlo Scarpa and others.
Was there ever a time in architecture when the elements blended so harmoniously that perfection was achieved?
Certainly Greece, that is to say Hellenism and statuary.
The world today is so violent, so hard, so mean, so warlike, that perfection is a utopia. I think that in order to achieve an interesting goal in this historical moment, it is necessary to have an unattainable mirage, because when we think of visions that are easy to achieve, we fatally think ‘low’, we think too pragmatically and therefore we are drained of emotion, drained of spirituality. This is my criticism of contemporary design, that it is pragmatically tied to the product. The word product is an ugly word! In order to make something good, we cannot talk about a product or a commodity, for God’s sake! we have to talk about things, objects, transience.
Is this idea of the works as a continuous jigsaw puzzle that cancels out any chronology a concept purely related to your philosophy, or a way of looking at art across the centuries in its entirety?
Gradually I became more and more attached to my memory. If we look at it, we find a labyrinth, crossed by ‘goings’ and ‘coming backs’, which ends at the extreme in a dead end from which we have no alternative but to go back and then, if at all, to dig up a memory, such as that of a window in a Romanesque church we visited fifteen years ago. It is this shadowy forest, from which it is difficult to emerge, that I believe represents a value in each person, a value that few know how to listen to, because the natural impulse is to look outwards, to tend towards extroversion, which then produces nothing but worldly communication. If everything were more introverted, the world would have more weight.
Objects, furniture, design, painting, installations, architecture, these are all different experiences of being an artist, but today our contemporaries read them as the same great craft. What path has led to a free confrontation and a vital contamination between disciplines?
In dealing with different disciplines, I do not set myself up as an example, nor do I consider myself a master. I think it is wrong in a way to be involved in several things. It is a very difficult dispersion to manage in the head. There are authors who, instead of expanding, explore in a very precise way, as in the case of Giorgio Morandi, for example. Lucky for him, he worked all his life with simple bottles arranged on a table, creating miracles and enormous poetry. I feel, however, that I cannot set myself up as a judge of the work of others, that I cannot say that the care and range of many things is a better method or not. If anything, I can set myself up as an example of an existentiality lived with extreme care for the things I decide to deal with, because then each of these things is made on the basis of a thesis to be proved, a hypothesis to be reached, a method to be pursued, and this puzzle as a whole has the sense of a pulviscular movement, which, however, as a whole, is perhaps nothing more than a nebula that diffuses a little light. Clearly, a discipline – we were just talking about Morandi, and this is a fantastic case! – if it is closed within its own internal rules, if it is not oxygenated from the outside, it can only end up in a whirlpool. This is where the oxygenation of one discipline by the method of another becomes very useful, in order to give each craft (the word creativity bothers me) an ideational force and thus to produce ideational work. It is therefore the crafts and their revaluation – from the architect to the baker, from the photographer to the hairdresser – that represent a possible salvation of an all-Italian ideativity.
How can an industrial project combine the pure and independent image of visual art with design and architecture, which must always respond to a concept of utility?
Even the industrial object can have its own expressiveness. It is not only the object of craftsmanship or sculpture that has a soul. A Swatch, for example, has a soul because multiplication does not deny the possibility of expression, which must therefore be sought and pursued. A criterion that does not correspond to a rule that applies to everyone: if the author, instead of pursuing expression through an ideational method, sets himself the goal of the object’s functionality, he moves from the expressive front to the hyper-technical front, but does not score any goals.
The same thing happens in architecture. Large construction sites such as the prefabrication of facades – in this sense faciatism has become an expression – can likewise address the technological aspect of architecture, but can also pursue the expressive and thus emotional aspect (see for example Frank O’Gehry versus Norman Foster). Then there is the need, and perhaps the necessity, for a return to archaism in the relationship between man and object. Martino Gamper makes unique chairs, different from each other and of which no copy will ever exist. A kind of reverse movement with respect to the series, which gives the buyer great satisfaction, because he knows he has an exclusive object and therefore possesses value. And this is the contrast we experience today between the I Pad and a sheet of paper.
You see cities as assembling art and architecture. Works that do not have to find a synthesis with each other, but must accumulate through experience. Doesn’t this way of thinking, if it is not supported by great artistic talents who know how to interpret contrasts and bring them into dialogue, risk leading to a lack of homogeneity in the environment?
By definition, the contemporary environment is uneven, i.e. there is no longer any hope of synthesis. The world is a patchwork, a kind of backstage, where there are pieces of the Aida, pieces of the Cavalleria Rusticana, and each of these pieces makes sense as a fragment, but does not have the synthesis of a whole.
We have a totally unravelled territory, but this unravelling in itself is not completely negative, because in its ‘unravelling’ there is an intention to synthesise the arts, and the arts can thus be assembled. Quality architecture is a beautiful territorial acupuncture and is good for the place, however what I call ‘banal’ architecture, i.e. surveyor’s building, has its aesthetic value when considered in the right sense. I like surveyors.
Are the environment, lifestyle and fashion elements to which art conforms, or is it rather art that sets the pace like a seismograph of our fragmented, ever-changing world?
Art is central, it is one of the most advanced elements in the development of things, even in a completely unconscious way, or by taking exaggerated leaps forward from reality in all its entities. I pay a lot of attention to what art produces, much more than to other elements, and all this is useful for me to understand and orient myself in the future. Yes, I believe that it is art that will guide our future.
How does your idea of a project that favours simplification over complexity, that does not look to academia but to irony, metaphor, excess, that brings together different cultures, the archaic and the avant-garde, that considers the connotations of epochs to be outdated, fit into today’s world?
You are practically talking about my mental confusion. I don’t know how my work adapts to reality, it happens through interactions with the environments I come into contact with, where I also work professionally. Therefore, if I have particular or exaggerated, pushed or even eccentric or wrong ideas, when they are translated into work, they undergo the right adjustments. The limits imposed by reality are very important, otherwise we would be working in the abstract. So here I make work that adapts to reality.
I would also like to explain that when a client comes to me, they know in some way what they are looking for. Then an agreement is made, a contact with the desire to achieve goals that are more abstract for me, but more concrete for the client. When I make an object, there is always something in it that has the character I try to give things, an emotional and romantic character.
When you speak of a project “for people”, you pose as indispensable the existence of two opposing realities that are destined to coexist: on the one hand, an architecture that delves into the multiple aspects of the social context, from the aesthetic to the anthropological and psychological, and interprets them sensitively; on the other hand, a “banal” architecture, but one that you consider positive, that creeps in and takes root despite all our good intentions, and that is often the cause of unstoppable architectural degradation. Is this our reality today?
I just said that I like surveyors, but this statement is clearly a paradox. What in Germany is called trivial design – the design of the banal – produces objects made by small factories without any pretension, just like a surveyor building a small house in the suburbs. This normality, which we read as banality, is very reassuring for people, because the sentimentality that kitsch grants is a great anchor for those who would be frightened by an excessive aesthetic presence. To live in the Uffizi would be terrifying, but to live in a surveyor’s cottage, with a Raphael print instead of the original work, gives those who live there a feeling of well-being and serenity. So I think this kind of paradox is an interesting observation, not only mine but also that of other authors such as Gillo Dorfles or Abraham Moles. This is the architecture of Bob Venturi. The cultivated use of the languages of the banal is a method I also use: skimming the banal to give it back to the cultivated people can expand the comprehensibility of what a designer can do.
Kitsch is something else, something more than the banal, because kitsch is really a design method: if I take a model of the Eiffel Tower of a certain height and put a bedside lamp on it, I create anthropological sensations in a person, a system of memories that come to the surface, which functionalist design cannot do because it is now completely cold. These kinds of objects are really charged with anthropological humanity, so they trigger not only that aspect but also the psychic, even psychoanalytic aspect.
Besides Savinio, the Futurists, Depero, Cubism and all the authors you have already mentioned, which artists and cultures have you looked at with the greatest interest?
Certainly yes, and there are many: from the Middle Ages, to Hellenism, to the Maya, to Egyptian painting and furniture, to Paolo Uccello’s horses, to Pisanello, and many more. It is on the basis of these interests that slip from moment to moment that sedimentations are created, a kind of encrustation on which to work.
For you, the search for the spirituality of a place is a fundamental factor in the renovation of a space, as is the symbiosis with the client’s psyche in order to design a living space for them rather than an object. What role do the fundamentals of your work as an architect play in this? And how do you overcome these fundamentals to achieve a degree of expressive freedom that is far removed from mass projects and marketing, which you do not believe in?
There are really two approaches to designing houses: one is to design a neighbourhood and then identify typologies that we try to relate as much as possible to the psyche of the people who are going to live there and whom you do not know; the other is to design a house specifically for the client, whom you get to know and with whom you establish a dialogue and interact. In this sense, I have had some very interesting experiences of houses for individuals, designed with the help of the psychologist or even with the client in analysis.
So they are very different approaches, but what unites them for me is the lack of interest in space as geometry and the considerable interest in psychic space. This is a very different way of looking at space: it is space as an extension of the mind rather than as abstract geometry. To enter a space is to enter a spiritually charged place. There is a sense of both animism and pantheism in this, because then both nature and the soul are a bit of an anthroposophical game.
I have travelled and visited a lot, even a shamanic place, and these very intense aspects involve me a lot, as does the religious aspect, but my work is a very cold, methodical work, made up of studies to be investigated and carried out. When you spoke at the beginning of our conversation about the tendency towards perfection, I did not mean that I am not interested in it or that I do not seek it, but that I prefer to turn and investigate in small steps, also based on curiosity, a working method that, I repeat, allows me to focus on things in a cold and rational way, overcoming the initial romantic aspect of the project. In my work I need solitude. My home is just above the studio, where I retreat to think and then move on to the colloquial phase of verifying, absorbing, explaining. This is also a method.
You define yourself as one of those people who do not know how to live, a statement that seems almost paradoxical for an architect and designer. Why do you find it so difficult to live at home and therefore to place objects and works in the intimacy of your own space?
Here we get into my private life. There are motivations in my history that have made it difficult for me to do certain things or make certain changes to my surroundings. When I inherited my father’s and mother’s houses, there was a determination on my part not to change them and a need not to bring in modern objects.
I think many people miss this sense of the unattainable and fragmentary nature of their lives, because then home is not one’s own apartment. Home is the memory of a forest, the memory of a hotel room, a grandfather’s country house. These are the premises of a person, not the four rooms in which we live. I will say more: if someone claims to own a house at this moment, he has created for himself a tomb, a refuge, and he is renouncing oxygen. Some people make a huge investment in their house, even from an inner point of view, and then there is the aspect of representation, of social and worldly visibility.
I live very well in my house, which is not a house but a kind of warehouse where I park my works waiting to be sent to exhibitions. It is therefore a house that is sometimes full of objects and boxes and sometimes empty. My house is also a way for me to perform certain actions that are always the same. For example, I can only read the newspaper at a certain table, sitting in a certain chair, with a certain lamp at eleven o’clock in the evening: this is my way of reading the morning paper. But the habits, the gestures, the actions do not stop there: there is the exact spot where I take my tea, there is a corner of the cupboard where I have arranged my favourite dishes, there is the same medicine spoon, in other words a whole series of somewhat obsessive actions. This is my home. The positive side of habits lived in one’s own home, which from the outside might be seen as obsessive, is, on the contrary, something fantastic! It’s no coincidence that in the last two issues I’ve signed for Domus, in the editorials I’ve called Diary, I’ve talked about my life in the morning, the two hours when I wake up and certain actions have to be taken in exactly the same way, otherwise the day cannot start.
