Proust armchair from Alessandro Mendini

The Italian architect Alessandro Mendini uses the process of the ‘’re-design’’ to give a new identity to objects stemming from themass production. For the Proust armchair (1979). The thought was to develop an image of a surface and the shape of an object, starting from a literary point of view, after having read about and researched Proust’s visual and material world. Mendini found an appropriate ready-made in the replica of an eighteenth century armchair, and chose a detail from a Signac painting for the pattern that covers the whole armchair, from its fabric to the wooden parts. Besides the idea of obtaining a piece of design based on imput that is unusual in a normal design process, he also wanted to reach a different type of result, to make a culturally grounded object based on a false one, seeing that the redesign in this case has been performed on a piece of kitsch, a fake-antique armchair that is still being -poduced today. The armchair Proust Geometrica ( 2001 ) is a new version of the Proust armchair created in 1979.