Alessandro Mendini’s trio of ‘energetic’ cupboards for Porro dance their means into the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024

The work of Alessandro Mendini wants little introduction; as a significant exponent of Italy’s Radical Design motion and founding father of design group Alchimia, but additionally because the creator of a few of up to date design’s most memorable icons. So it was a nice shock when his daughters Fulvia and Elisa Mendini, custodians of his archives and legacy, resurfaced a trio of cupboards to be reissued by Italian furnishings firm Porro. 

Alessandro Mendini and Porro

Mendini had labored with Porro in 2014, when he created the ‘Maggio’ chest of drawers and ‘Schermo’ cupboard. The designer had experimented with wooden marquetry, creating summary geometric compositions in elm, oak and acacia on their surfaces. Mendini not solely mixed straight and curved strains to realize the sample, however he additionally performed with three-dimensionality with sloped fronts, indirect strains and trapezoid varieties.

‘Our father has at all times been fascinated and fascinated about excessive craftsmanship: a factor that he present in Porro on the event of their first expertise collectively. There he had performed with the absence of color, or truly with the color of the pure wooden essences, which was one thing that he preferred a lot,’ says Elisa Mendini.

Porro not too long ago went again into the Mendini archives, working intently with the household to deliver to life a beforehand unseen physique of labor. The result’s ‘Linea’, a household of containers comprising a excessive writing desk with a drop-leaf door and interior partitions, an in depth cabinet with hinged doorways and an open cabinet with drawer, every launched in a restricted version of fifty items. The gathering is outlined by the identical marquetry method of Mendini’s earlier works for Porro, however on this case the compositions are rendered in beautiful main colors. ‘If we needed to describe these items of furnishings, we’d say they’re suggestive, energetic, vibrant and luminous,’ provides Fulvia Mendini.

Within the archive, the sisters had discovered the drawings for the furnishings, which they describe as having ‘a really superior degree of design’, and along with Porro they developed the ultimate objects. With its give attention to innovation and craftsmanship, Porro was the right companion to work on the intricacy of the designs, which specific Mendini’s daring imaginative and prescient and his means to steadiness design and manufacturing (‘He was like a funambolo, a tightrope walker,’ says Maria Porro).

The three works mix main colors with black and white components. ‘They’re intersections of strains that end in patchwork-like triangular shapes,’ explains Fulvia. The drawings instructed a depth that atypical lacquer couldn’t obtain. ‘This is the reason we regarded for an alternate answer and located a producer of cellulose acetate plates, a cloth usually used for glasses that can also be appropriate for making the pointed geometries of those decorations,’ explains Maria Porro. ‘For these sideboards we additionally had to supply a specific fastening system, experimenting with completely different options.’

The compositions are framed by stable bands of colors, or elevated by a lightweight blue border, an empty house, a curved-edged drawer. ‘Lorenzo and Maria Porro needed to do a tribute to the work of our dad, the place color has at all times been a protagonist,’ provides Elisa.