Alessandro Mendini  

There is also a lot right with him...
...but you ask: What is wrong with him, I have to say nothing. If you ask: what is it that makes people dislike him, I can only guess.
- First of all there are quite a lot of people in the Italian design community that dislike the kind of Rasputin-role that he gave himself within the Alessi company.I am not close enough to the company to confirm that that is indeed what he did or does. But I am certainly close enough to a number of Italian designers that have expressed that kind of frustration.
- Within the design community he is alos often seen as someone with an interesting discourse but unable to design or produce credible alternatives. To keep it simple: It is nice to be critical about people that work within the field of mass production, but you either do it as a critic and you argue your point in public, or you do it as a designer by producing an alternative that is credible. Mendini has chosen to do both, which is fine, but non of it seems very credible. His writing is the strongest of the two but more manifesto-like than properly argumented, which is disliked by people that have no need for a design religion. His products and projects are sometimes interesting but have never been a proper alternative for the products he is so critical about.
- A lot of people are turned off by his stubborn post-modern beliefs. When I was a small stubborn boy and my theacher mentioned it to my mother she asked: "Was he right or wrong, because if he was wrong he is stubborn indeed, if he was right he was only showing perseverance" So I leave it up to you to decide if it is a good reason to dislike Mendini.
- Last but not least, our society or a large part of it's members dislike the idea of soemthing or someone being in-accesible. Whether it is pure elitism or simply by being too complex for the un-educated mind to be understood. Alessandro Mendini is out somewhere in that field. Which makes a lot of people un-confortable.

Hi Koen, I'll think about...
Hi Koen, I'll think about it. Thanks.