According to Italian architect and designer Mario Bellini it is more difficult to design a chair than a skyscraper. After all chairs have been around since ancient times (Bellini has a fascination with Tutankhamun's throne/chair...) and the way they are designed has an influence on our posture and on the actions we perform while sitting on them.
Bellini is right as, designing an iconic piece, something genuinely timeless that can decorate an interior design space in a stylish way while improving people's lives, is no mean feat.
Bellini is currently getting ready for Milan Design Week (9th - 14th April), but in the meantime Moscow is hosting a comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the 84-year-old designer and architect, "Mario Bellini. Italian Beauty".
Born in 1935, Bellini studied architecture at Milan's Politecnico (Gio Ponti was one of his lecturers). After he graduated he opened his own studio and in the early '60s he started working with La Rinascente.
As the years passed he designed iconic products for Olivetti, among them computers, typewriters and calculators; he also designed in 1968 "Pop" a portable record player that became a sensation since it allowed people to listen to their favourite vinyl records wherever they wanted (and that many critics with hindsight consider as the ancestor of the iPod).
In 1972 he designed the Kar-a-Sutra, a mini-van concept for the exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" at New York MoMA, a prototype that 13 years later inspired automotive companies to launch the first minivans.
In the early 1981 he met Steve Jobs at a lecture, but he refuses to collaborate with Apple and, from the '80s on, he mainly dedicated himself to architecture.
Last year Bellini presented during Milan Design Week, a series of products, including tables and chairs, and he's currently focused on architectural projects in Rome and in the Caribbeans (on the island of Virgin Gorda), though his dream remains building a city in China.
"Mario Bellini. Italian Beauty" (until 13th April 2019) at the Architecture Museum A.V. Ščusev in Moscow is the travelling version of the original eponymous exhibition held at Milan's Triennale in 2017 that celebrated the 30th anniversary of the MoMa exhibition about Bellini organised in 1987.
The exhibition is a comprehensive event – Bellini defines it a "perspective" on him rather than a "retrospective" since it covers 60 years of design.
Visitors are invited to (re)discover products such as the 1977 "CAB 412" chair for Cassina Spa consisting in a leather structure mounted on a metal frame, the iconic "Pop" record player and the 1972 super soft "Le Bambole" (The dolls) sofa for B&B Italia Spa, that caused a scandal when photographer Oliviero Toscani, called to shoot the marketing campaign, featured in the image a topless Donna Jordan.
The journey continues through Bellini's own photographic reportages from his trips to Japan and the USA in the early '70s, his sketches, drawings and illustrations and then an extensive section dedicated to his architectural projects, from the Villa Erba Exhibition and Convention Centre in Cernobbio (Como) and the Tokyo Design Centre in Japan to the Department of Islamic Art at the Louvre in Paris, and the new museum "Antiquarium" at the Roman Forum in Rome (2014-2019).
The title of the exhibition hints at the fact that beauty can save, and while Bellini conceives beauty as an unstoppable force and you want and must believe in this statement and in his vision (especially in the historical period we are living in...), there is another message to take home for visitors - the final aim of an architect and designer's work is not just creating a beautiful building or object, but sparking a dialogue between people, cultures, religions and cities.
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