Bordone - Enzo Mari - 2025

Simona Bordone: Enzo Mari - Milan, Masters of Architecture Design curated by Marianna Guernieri - RCS 2025.

in 4to, 26 x 28.5 cm., softcover with flaps, 95 pages, fully illustrated in color, excellent condition, intact cover, binding firm, interior pages clean with no creases or stains, perfect collectible copy.

Mari applied to his production his personal studies on perception and the social aspect of design, its function in daily life and the designer’s role in the industrial process. According to Mari, the designer should not have limited himself to creating beautiful objects and pleasant forms: the functional aspect was essential, as was the efficiency of design choices in materials and workmanship; there can be no poetry without method. According to one of the grandees of Italian design, Alessandro Mendini, Mari is not a designer; if it weren’t for his objects I would care little. Mari, instead, is the conscience of all of us, the conscience of designers, and that matters. Critical of what design became after the golden age of the sixties and seventies, Mari blames marketing for transforming the designer from a creative philosopher into a mere interpreter of trends. In light of these considerations, in 1999 Mari wrote the Barcelona Manifesto, where he argues that it is necessary to return to the “utopian tension of the origins of design” and calls for a new Hippocratic oath in which “ethics is the goal of every project.”

Mari is universally regarded as one of the greatest theorists of Italian and world design. Since the fifties he has participated in avant-garde movements related to design, joining the kinetic art group: there he had the opportunity to meet Bruno Munari, who would influence part of his future works, such as 16 animals and 16 fish. In 1963 he became coordinator of the New Tendencies Group and organized the group’s exhibition at the Zagreb Biennale of 1965. From 1963 to 1966 he taught at the Scuola della Società Umanitaria in Milan: it was the first of his teaching experiences, continued through the 2000s in numerous prestigious institutions including the Politecnico di Milano, where he taught several courses in the faculties of Industrial Design and Architecture; in the eighties he was a professor at ISIA in Florence (Istituto superiore per le industrie artistiche) with a design workshop that yielded particularly interesting results. In Parma he taught Art History. During those years he developed his own theory of design and applied it in projects across product, graphics, and exhibitions. For this ongoing pursuit, he was awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1967 for his “individual research on design.” Also in 1967 he began his decade-long collaboration with Ceramiche Gabbianelli: in response to a request to design some decorations for “design tiles,” Mari refused a mere graphic role and undertook a complex philosophical path that led him to revisit the roots of the concept of wall decoration. For his tiles (Elementary Series of 1968, Traces of 1978 and Decorated by Hand of 1981, among the most important), Mari revived past technologies and developed a poetics of form and color made of elementary signs. In 1970 Mari published The Function of Aesthetic Research, in which he shifted the debate about design from the product to the figure of the designer. In 1972 Mari participated in the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition at the MOMA in New York; the show, extremely important, marked the birth of the fame of “Made in Italy” worldwide, introducing objects by the era’s greatest designers, such as Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass and Paolo Lomazzi. Mari was present at the exhibition with the reversible vase Pago-Pago (1969) by Danese, a molded ABS vase that could be used upright or inverted, changing its aesthetic appearance; the underlying idea was to enable flexibility of use, given the impossibility of creating perfect design for every environment. From 1976 to 1979 he was president of the Association for Industrial Design, the body awarding the Compasso d’Oro design prizes. In 1983 the University of Parma dedicated a personal show to him, thanks to a collection of 8500 sketches and original drawings donated by Mari to the Center for Studies and Archives of Communication of the university. Works by Mari are exhibited in the world’s leading art and design museums, including, for example, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Two days before his death, on October 17, a retrospective titled Enzo Mari, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, was inaugurated at the Milano Triennale, a wide and well-documented survey of sixty years of activity with two hundred fifty works exhibited.

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