Mari Enzo (Novara, 1932) is an Italian architect and designer.
Mari attended the Brera Academy from 1952 to 1956 formed in literature and art, and deepening the themes of the psychology of visual perception.
After his studies, he immediately devoted himself to the emerging world of industrial design, presenting his first project in the Danish manufacturer of furniture in Milan in 1957.
Mari applied to its production of its own studies on the themes of perception and the social aspect of design, its function in daily life and the role of designers in the industrial process.
The designer, according to Mari, would not have had to limit the creation of beautiful and pleasant forms: the functional aspect was essential, as was the efficiency of the design choices in the field of materials and processes, there can be no poetry without method .
Mari recovers the slogan of the Movement of Art Program, which was representative in his youth, which cites: our aim is to make you a partner. The user is no longer passive consumers, but it becomes a beneficiary of an object and a process (the design) in which an active part.
According to another great Italian design, Alessandro Mendini, Mari is not a designer, if there were no matter to me, not its objects. Mari is rather the conscience of us all, is the consciousness of designers, this matters.
Critical of what has become the design on completion of the golden era of the sixties and seventies, Mari gives marketers the guilt of having turned from the designer's creative philosophy in a simple interpreter of trends. In view of these considerations, in 1999, Mari wrote the Manifesto of Barcelona, where it states that you must return to the "power of the utopian origins of design" and called for a new oath of Hippocrates that "ethics is the goal of every project ".
The career as a designer
Mari is universally considered one of the leading theoreticians of the Italian design world.
Since the Fifties part in the avant-garde movements associated with the design, entering the group of kinetic art: there he met Bruno Munari, which will influence the future of his works, including 16 animals and 16 fish.
In 1963 he became coordinator of the New Trend Group and organizes the group's exposure to the Biennale Zagreb 1965.
From 1963 to 1966 taught at the School of Humanitarian Milan was the first of his experiences as a teacher, which continued until the year 2000 in several prestigious schools including the Politecnico di Milano, where he gave several courses in the faculties of Industrial Design and Architecture or to Parma where he was professor of art history.
During those years developed his own theory on the design and put into practice in the projects on which he worked in the fields of product, graphics and installations. For this continuous study, was honored in 1967 with a Golden Compass for its "research on individual design."
Also in 1967 he began his ten-year collaboration with Gabbianelli: to a request to draw some of the decorations for "piastelle design," Mari refused to play a simple role graph and undertook a complex philosophical journey that led him to review the roots the concept of decoration on the wall. For its tiles (Elementary Series of 1968, the 1978 Track and decorated by hand in 1981, the most important), Mari recovers technologies of the past and prepare a poetic forms and colors made of elementary signs.
In 1974 Mari gives the prints of the aesthetic function, which shifts the focus of debate about product design from the figure of the designer.
In 1972 Mari participates exhibitionism Italy - The New Domestic Landscape, at the MOMA in New York the exhibition, important, and that gave birth to the reputation of "Made in Italy" in the world, containing objects of the greatest designers of the time, such as Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass and Paul Lomazzi.
Mari was present at the exhibition with the vase reversible Pago Pago (1969) by Danish, a vase molded ABS plastic that could be used upright or upside down, changing their appearance: the idea was to allow flexibility, the inability to create the perfect design for any environment.
From 1976 to 1979 he was president of Industrial Design, known for the Golden Compass award prizes for design.
In 1983 the University of Parma has dedicated a solo exhibition, thanks to a 8500 collection of original sketches and drawings donated by Mari at the Centre for Communication Studies and Archive of the University.
Mari works are exhibited in major museums of art and design world, including the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.
In 2001 he published the Project and passion.
In 2008 he was paid by the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin a personal retrospective on the occasion of the International Year of Design.