Alessandro Mendini
Italy

In Hamburg, after years of preparation, in 2014 a new platform for presentations and debates relating to design opened in the form of designxport. Currently on show: an exhibition on the gender influence in design and possible alternatives.

Members of the furniture industry will soon be flocking to Milan again to worship the novelties cult at the Salone. What can we expect? Or is the furniture fair merely the appetizer before the Expo?

The “Tea & Coffee Towers” project, initiated by Alberto Alessi and Alessandro Mendini in 2002, has long since enjoyed legendary status. Now, three interviews have been released in which David Chipperfield, Greg Lynn and Gary Chang explain how they went about it.

On behalf of Munich's Neue Pinakothek Alessandro Mendini has curated a retrospective of the last 30 years of Italian design. Sandra Hofmeister talked with him about the "Objects with a Soul" and eclecticism in design.

Achille Castiglioni, Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Richard Sapper talk in these short "Design Interviews", which are now out on DVD, about their paths to what was still, at that time, a new discipline, about their own development and careers, about their search for design solutions, which, for the most part, still owed greater allegiance to society than to industry.