I know Mario Bellini from my Milanese years, with frequent visits to his studio and his drawing-room. We are in the eighties, years of sun and fair weather, when it was thought that anything could be done, on the path to beauty, well-being, and happiness. Years of yuppies, of success, but also of much intense and serious work, without the cloud of pessimism that, today, shows no sign of clearing. For Mario Bellini, no cloud is so great as to obscure the wide scope of his creativity, from his La Rinascente years to his Renault years, and through his Olivetti years, when he designed the world's first personal computer. And so on, with magnificent restorations, such as that of the Grattacielo Rosso in Trieste. His studio/workshop is a large workshop, where things continue to be created to inspire wonder, a feat that has earned him the Compasso d'Oro award eight times, an accolade given for the ability to combine engineering, advanced technology, and the charm of form.
In that itinerary, begun with Nathan Rogers, Giò Ponti and Portaluppi, a fully rounded primacy of responsibility, from the object, to the building, to the city, to the landscape, with a wise continuity rich in pixels, fruitful in new goals that come from the ideas of a brilliant individual, connected to a community, where words and language, they are made for each other and the “eternal” direction of House, from 1979 to 2019, with a gaze directed at himself and others, with an idea of myth, of legend, of founding the real. Mario Bellini today, has the same smile and the same intuitive intelligence as ever. For him, memory, what has already been done, is not a burden, a show awaiting an encore, but a tradition of the new, a stimulus to overcome and surpass himself, because there is no finish line on the horizon; it is merely an impulse for sight and as it recedes, it asks him to do more and better.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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