Alessandro Mendini was born in Milan.
As a boy, he lived in a bourgeois house designed by Piero Portaluppi and full of fascinating paintings by Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini, Massimo Campigli, Giorgio Morandi and the many other artists present in his family's collection of modernist paintings. These surroundings were instrumental in the formation of his creativity. After earning his degree in Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, his direct influences were Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Marcello Nizzoli and Gio Ponti.
Interested in writing and theorizing in addition to drawing, he successively directed the magazines Casabella (1970-1976), Modo (1977-1981) and Domus (1980-1985 and 2010).
This work was carried out parallel to his fellowship with the Alchimia studio, whose whole adventure he shared. Both roads led him toward radical design, neo-modern architecture and toward a calligraphic, coloristic, symbolic, romantic and problem-based approach to designing. Since then, he has composed a fairy-tale world of objects, furniture, prototypes, products, paintings, writings, settings, installations and situations that were often interwoven, complex, controversial, paradoxical, light-hearted and literary.
Ever since, he has been collaborating with companies such as Alessi, Philips, Swatch and many others, and is a consultant for different manufacturers (including ones from the Middle East) to guide their approach to image and design.
Not being too adept at the rhetoric of teaching, Alessandro Mendini has not taught much at all, except for a few years in Vienna. In any case, he is among the founders of the Domus Academy in Milan.
He is an honorary member of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem; has received the Compasso d'Oro of Design in 1979, 1981 and 2014; is Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France; and has received honorary status from the Architectural League of New York.
Mendini has also received degrees honoris causa from the Milan Polytechnic, the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland.
He is an honorary professor of the Academic Council at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China, and an honorary citizen of the city of Guangzhou, Korea.
Just recently, he received the European Prize for Architecture 2014 in Chicago.
His work is found in museums and private collections the world over.
Mendini's work shows two sides of one soul. One is solitary and introverted. The other is focused on group work. Indeed, he has done many projects alone, but just as many have been the groups that he has put together – with unknowns as well as famous designers and artists.
In 1989 he opened Atelier Mendini in Milan with his brother, the architect Francesco Mendini. The Atelier designed the Alessi factory complex in Omegna; the Olympic pool of Trieste; subway stations and the restoration of the City Hall in Naples; the Byblos Art Hotel – Villa Amistà in Verona; offices for Trend Group in Vicenza; the rehabilitation of three industrial areas in Bovisa, Milan; the renewal of the seaside boardwalk of the city of Catanzaro, Italy; a tower in Hiroshima, Japan; the Groninger Museum in The Netherlands; a city district in Lugano, Switzerland; the office buildings of Madsack in Hannover; a commercial building in Lörrach, Germany; and other buildings in Europe, USA and Korea.
In Korea, the Atelier is coordinating a number of projects for urban planning, interiors and industrial design.
Atelier Mendini is a laboratory, a crafts-based design workshop that explores the fields of vision, aesthetics, psychology and image in order to create a landscape of poetic figures to contrast the world's violence.
