Redesign di sedie del movimento moderno: Superleggera di Gio Ponti

Alessandro Mendini

In 1978 Alessandro Mendini joined the group Alchimia, an experimental lab for design that radically challenged the dogma of functionalist design. For his series Redesign di sedie del movimento moderno, Mendini reworked modern design classics, emphasizing their most striking features and changing their aura by adding new elements and motifs. Here he equipped Gio Ponti’s Superleggera with four brightly coloured metal flags that seem to blow in the wind, in a humorous commentary on Ponti’s search for lightness. With this technique, Mendini transformed mass-produced consumer goods into objects of aesthetic exploration and blurred the boundary of design and art. Mendini’s concept of redesign shaped the postmodernist debate on design during the 1980s, when decoration, ornament, and references to historical styles were rediscovered as sources of inspiration. Text: Elena Dellapiana