Enzo Mari, the designer who hated the design industry

Enzo Mari was a hard worker. But, perhaps even more, he was hard work. He could be harsh, intransigent, dismissive, abusive, contrarian. He despised the design industry, manufacturers, galleries, fairs, advertising and the media. He despaired of academia. He disliked the digital, suggesting that people had become cyborgs umbilically attached to their phones.

He was an unrepentant communist and an uncompromising opponent of consumerism. The one time I met him in Milan, when I told him I worked for the FT, he almost spat in disgust, spluttering on his stubby cigar, glaring at me from beneath bushy black eyebrows and giving me a half-hour lecture on the evils of capitalism. In an interview in 2009, he memorably described his nation’s design as “pornography”, made by the “Italian mafia for the Russian mafia”.

But Mari could also be brilliant, incisive, honest and outrageously funny. And, despite his resistance, he has been absorbed into the design canon as one of the greats, responsible for some of the most recognisable products of the postwar Italian design boom. His contemporary, the designer Alessandro Mendini, referred to him as “the conscience of design”.

Just as Mari was difficult in life, he hasn’t become any easier since he died. An early casualty of Covid — he and his wife, the critic and curator Lea Vergine, died a day apart in 2020 — he donated his archive to the city of Milan, on condition that it remained closed for 40 years. But it is precisely that prickly legacy of resistance, refusal and constant questioning that makes him such an inspiration and why an exhibition is always cause for celebration and provocation.

The exhibition at London’s Design Museum, opening March 29, is a version of a show held at the Milan Triennale in 2020 and planned before Mari died. It will probably be the last to show items from that tantalising, and now closed, archive.  

Mari was born in Cerano and moved as a child to nearby Milan, where he endured a harsh induction into big-city life after his father became too ill to work. Mari had to support his family by delivering vegetables and doing odd jobs from sign-writing to bricklaying. The hardship moulded his egalitarian political leanings. Without a high-school diploma, he found himself excluded from universities but managed to get a place at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera. 

He launched himself into Italy’s mid-century “economic miracle”, where Milan formed the epicentre of a reinvention of design as both a financial and cultural driver. In 1958, he met Bruno Danese, who had just established his eponymous company with his wife Jacqueline Vodoz, and they hit it off. Mari’s designs from this era include the sublime Formosa wall calendar, in which a series of hanging plates could be changed daily to create a perpetual rotation. It was a perfect blend of graphics, invention and the need to interact with the product and think a little about the day, something so characteristic of the designer’s work. 

His later Timor desk calendar developed the idea in a product that still looks strikingly contemporary. He designed pans and casseroles for Le Creuset, lamps for Artemide and a superb, simple chair in metal and PVC for Castelli.

He was also known for illustrated children’s books and toys, notably the still-popular 16 Animals, a collection of creatures cut from a single piece of oak which can be reassembled into a jigsaw. It is a beautiful thing. My favourite, however, is the Putrella (also for Danese), a table centrepiece or fruit bowl based on an I-beam, slightly bent up at its ends to create a striking vessel. 

This anti-market designer somehow managed to work with the biggest design manufacturers to produce over a thousand designs in his lifetime, many of which remain in production.

Yet despite this apparent deluge of popular products, it was a book for which Mari is still most admired. In 1974, he produced a set of instructions for a range of easy-to-make furniture. The first page of Autoprogettazione? reads: “A project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails. An elementary technique to teach anyone to look at present production with a critical eye.

“Anyone”, it continues, “apart from factories and traders, can use these designs to make them by themselves. The author hopes the idea will last into the future and asks those who build their furniture, and in particular variations of it, to send photos to his studio at 10 piazzale Baracca . . . ”

It certainly did last into the future. This radical, distributive act of empowerment became one of the most accessible critiques of the design industry and its aspirations to luxury and exclusivity and Mari’s most lasting legacy. 

The Design Museum show attempts to look across the designer’s career, from art and pedagogy to games and graphics. A remarkable array of artists have been commissioned to respond to the work, including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mimmo Jodice, Dozie Kanu and Virgil Abloh.

For Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-curator of the exhibition, “Mari wanted design to be about the production of knowledge — as opposed to consumption.” 

The one time I met him in Milan, when I told him I worked for the FT, he almost spat in disgust, and gave me a half-hour lecture on the evils of capitalism

“He also had this fluidity of practice,” Obrist tells me, “an interdisciplinary approach which seems very modern.”

For academic and writer Cat Rossi, “Mari stands out as a political design firebrand . . . Design is about communication,” she says, “and that communication is the key to revolution. He showed how design could be a political act.”

Mari was particularly animated by working conditions. That hardscrabble childhood imbued him with a respect for labour and the artisan. He refused to work with manufacturers who shifted production to Asia where working conditions might be opaque. The irony, of course, was that in sticking to those morals, his work remained expensive and unavailable to the masses with whom his sympathies lay. He did, however, design a cheap, elegant sofa bed (the Day-Night) and in 1971 he managed to persuade Driade to mass manufacture it to keep unit costs down. It was a commercial disaster.

The Autoprogettazione project was designed explicitly to address the issues of cost, accessibility and labour. It was about enabling people to make their own furniture with their own hands and in so doing to educate themselves about design. Architect Tom Emerson, of practice 6a, tells me: “It was a democratisation of design, but it was also about taking it out of the world of branding and marketing, which he hated.” 6a authored a contemporary sequel to the book, Dust Free Friends, in 2015, with a new range of simple furniture designs. Emerson calls it “a book to apply similar thinking to the era of the cordless drill”. 

“Autoprogettazione is often seen as belonging a long tradition of DIY manuals, but it is actually a manifesto about design and consumerism,” says Emerson. When it was launched, Mari distributed the book himself, by post. As for the photos of the finished work that people sent back to him, Mari being Mari, he mostly hated them. One owner of a US chalet who had commissioned others to make the furniture to fill his holiday home was singled out and accused of turning the designs into kitsch.

The show at the Design Museum will be his first major retrospective in London, a real opportunity to engage with one of the most influential designers of the modern age. Mari, I’m sure, would have hated it. 

“Enzo Mari”, at the Design Museum, London, March 29-September 8; designmuseum.org

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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