Hello, Enzo Mari
Category: Make it yourself
When it comes to MIY (make it yourself), Enzo Mari is my go-to reference. Like the furniture of Donald Judd and (some of) Gerrit Rietveld, the designs he developed for his 1974 Autoprogettazione? project are elegantly attractive in a kind of brutalist manner, uncomplicated in design and easy to construct. What’s not to like?
Mari’s legacy is far more than Autoprogettazione?, of course. His career spanned six decades, during which he designed furniture, children’s toys, office supplies and more. Simultaneously, he was a provocative theorist who constantly questioned the consumer culture that employed him. He won five Compasso d'Oro prizes, which reward the best in Italian industrial design. His work and influence were recognised in a recent retrospective which came to London’s Design Museum in 2024.
Several of his elegantly simple designs are still in production and available at twentytwentyone, like the Mariolina dining chair.
While he is not as famous as other post-war Italian designers, he does appear to be the designer’s favourite designer. Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison typify this attitude in their review of the In Attesa wastepaper basket that Mari designed for Danesi in 1971.
Irony is that despite all these other noteworthy designs, Autoprogettazione? gets a disproportionate amount of attention. Search YouTube and it looks like at least half the Mar-related content is about building furniture from this 1974 book. Worse, the fact that the project was not intended as simply a template for DIY production but a means for non-specialists to better understand - and hence question - the design and manufacturing processes, also tends to get lost.
Still, it’s most non-specialists’ introduction to Mari, and it was mine too. I fell in love with a picture of a weirdly beautiful table I came across on Pinterest. It was from Autoprogettazione? As soon as I needed to furnish my new flat, I knew exactly what I wanted. The fact that I made it myself made it all the more special.
And, honestly, who could resist the impish, contrarian Grandpa schtick of Mari in his later years and not be inspired by this video of him demonstrating the simplicity of Chair 1?
What’s useful about Autoprogettazione? is that it can act as a basis of your own experimentation. Like adapting a recipe to your own tastes, you can start with one of these designs and tweak the dimensions, add colour or a finish, or even modify the designs themselves. Which is exactly what Erik Eie Almqvist does in his excellent book, Hammer & Nail.
It’s a proper how-to for beginners and includes a number of modifications of Mari’s 1974 designs plus some beauties of Almqvist’s own making. It deserves a post all of its own but for now here’s the reason I got hold of the book, another case of love at first sight. If I had a bigger flat, I’d definitely make one of these standard lamps. Just gorgeous.
But before you get to a place where you’re improvising on Mari’s theme, you’ll need the original book. If you want to pick up a copy, there are plenty of sources online, but in keeping with Decmatic Diktat number 4, why not support an independent like Tender Books.
Happy building (and don’t forget to share your creations with us :-).
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