A retrospective of the last 30 years of Italian design

One of the really great figures of design – Alessandro Mendini – is curating and designing a retrospective of the last 30 years of Italian design specially for Die Neue Sammlung. Mendini focuses his exhibition on a key player in the design world: the Alessi company, which has very successfully morphed from a small metal-working firm into a creative factory in the field of design with global operations. Not only with its products but above all through its influential ideas, actions and meta projects Alessi wrote European design history and provided inspiration for reflections on the future of design.Since the 1970s Alessandro Mendini has played a central role for the development of Italian design as designer, architect and theoretician. His unusual, radical ideas made him a mentor and stimulus for the creative avant-garde. Mendini founded groups such as Global Tools and Alchimia, managed the most influential Italian design magazines and with his theories on banal and re-design was instrumental in securing the success of Postmodernism. Universality and poetry characterize his utopian visions and stand for an oeuvre that repeatedly crosses the divides between the various arts.

Alberto Alessi joined the family business in 1970, and Mendini has collaborated with him since the late 1970s – “a relationship recalling that of Peter Behrens with the AEG” (Alberto Alessi) – and works for the company as architect, graphic and product designer, design manager and consultant and – as a historiographer.

Mendini incorporates into his exhibition concept a critical reflection on the design tradition at Alessi, which extends from the famous tea and coffee set “Bombé” from the immediate post-war period via the “Bel Design“ of the 1950s and 1960s and postmodernism through to the fairly contemporary pluralist design, and in doing so he simultaneously highlights the development of design in Italy. Highly typical are the so-called metaprojects such as “Tea & Coffee Piazza“ (1983), or “Tea & Coffee Towers“ (2003) in which – as in the 1950s – “pure” architects tackled classic design tasks, though the creations were presented as “multiples”, “collector’s items”.

However, Mendini’s conception extends beyond the company’s earlier projects and also addresses the present with its radical changes. Mendini effectively addresses the general design strategies and approaches adopted by current design such as sustainability, energy balance, recycling, new technologies and production processes etc., but also aspects relating to the cultural dynamism between East and West and the altered aesthetics of a globalized world characterized by rapid changes.These ideas were incorporated into the new meta project “Alessi of the future” a kind of hypothetical, socio-cultural scenario that can ultimately generate genuinely new projects, according to Alberto Alessi. In collaboration with the company Mendini developed the requirements or hypotheses for design with a future. This led to ten more elaborated projects many of which were worked on with new designers. Compared with today’s design classics the objects exemplify the altered premises for coming developments, which can equally be interpreted as a challenge for the Italian company but also for design worldwide. The work in the dream factory continues …A publication accompanies the exhibition. Edited by Alberto Alessi and Alessandro Mendini. Graphic Design: Italo Lupi. In a German/Italian and an English/French edition.