Andrea Branzi, who has died aged 84, was the last of a generation of Italian architects and designers that made their country the world’s leading centre for design. The art curator Germano Celant coined the term “radical design” to describe the work of Branzi and his friends Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, even before he had identified the arte povera movement.
Branzi tried to disconnect design from the market, an idea that might seem a perverse case of biting the hand that has fed designers since the Industrial Revolution, but for him, design was as much about what things mean as what they do. He used it to ask questions about the nature of the things that we use in everyday life and our relationship with them.
Ideas mattered to him, and he also had a natural gift for form and colour. Branzi’s problem with modern design was that it is based on mass production, which makes for affordable but identical objects without individual personality or character. Though he did produce some relatively conventional work, such as sofas for Cassina, he was best known for one-off pieces such as his Animali Domestici series from 1985.
No two of the Animali Domestici – meaning “pets” – pieces could be exactly the same. In the series, Branzi combined raw tree branches with conventional seats and legs to make chairs and benches with a surreal mix of rough and smooth, and natural and artificial finishes.
His career was long enough to read like a history of contemporary design. Along with Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello and Massimo Morozzi, Branzi was a founder member of Archizoom, the best known of the cluster of design co-operatives that sprung up in Florence in the 1960s with exotic names such as Superstudio, Zziggurat, Gruppo 9999 and UFO.
In those days it was not necessary to build much to have an impact. Archizoom proposed the “no-stop city”, a concept that set out to abolish architecture altogether by turning the landscape into a highly serviced grid that could enable anything that its nomadic inhabitants needed. They could plug into power and communications anywhere. The no-stop drawings can be understood as a depiction of what a city enabled by an internet that did not yet exist could be like.
As a member of Archizoom, Branzi took part in Italy, the New Domestic Landscape, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972. At that time, Italy was in the middle of a murderous period of violent terrorism, and in Branzi’s view it was no time to be presenting the country in terms of its glossy good taste. He created a defiantly angry and empty room in which he played a recorded child’s voice reading a script that he had written. The avant garde, he proclaimed, was no longer a way of making a more attractive city for the middle classes, it had to be understood as a challenge to the existing order.
With the rise of bombings, shootings and kidnappings in Italy, Branzi lost confidence in the countercultural leftism of the 60s, but did not lose his radicalism. Rather than designing products for conventional manufacturers that could only fail to live up to his intentions, he chose to work mainly on pieces of design that questioned and challenged, but which did not always seek to offer practical answers.
When Elio Fiorucci took what he had seen of London fashion in Kensington Market, added an Italian flavour and took it to New York, he asked Branzi and Sottsass to design his first store there. Branzi also worked with Sottsass on the Fiorucci Alfa Romeo Giulietta car in 1978. Dubbed the “punk” edition, it had specially made blue rubber tyres and bodywork finished in cream-coloured impasto paint, speckled with a mist of red, green and blue dots.
Born in Florence, Andrea was the son of Lorenza Corsi, who ran a bookshop, and Renato Branzi, a railwayman. Both his parents were active in the resistance to the fascist regime during the war.
He studied architecture at Florence University, graduating in 1966, when the wave of unrest that swept Italy’s universities began; faculty members included the writer Umberto Eco. Paradoxically, it was because the past had such a strong presence in Florence that the city was a fertile ground for the radicals who were looking to turn the idea of design and architecture on its head. Branzi said of Florence: “It was a city that, since it did not know modernity, allowed us to invent another form of modernity.”
When the disparate design tribes of Italy briefly coalesced to form the Global Tools movement in 1973, Branzi and his wife, Nicoletta Morozzi, whom he had married in 1969, moved to Milan and became essential members. Global Tools was influenced by the Californian countercultural magazine Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand, which focused on self-sufficiency and alternative living. Global Tools’ members were interested in the writings of Ivan Illich and Victor Papanek, who explored early approaches to sustainability and attacked the preconceptions of professions such as teaching, medicine and design.
After Branzi moved to Milan he joined both the Alchymia group with Mendini, and subsequently Sottsass’s Memphis movement. He was one of the founders of Domus Academy – which was widely regarded as the international launchpad for teaching postmodern design – and went on to teach at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
Celant wrote of Branzi in 1992: “He is sometimes ironical, sometimes fiercely critical; he seems as if he has taken on the role of a multiple figure, who slipped from one role to the next, gathering and summarising all the figurations; he became a primitive and a child, a narrator and a theorist, in order to escape all definitions and continue transforming non-values into values.”
Celant’s assessment is an accurate reflection of the remarkably wide range of projects Branzi worked on. For one provocative exhibition with Alchymia, he painted his own Piet Mondrian, and certified it as an authentic fake. He and Nicoletta made films and curated exhibitions, notably on “neo-prehistory” at the Milan Triennale. He explored the future of the workplace for the Swiss design company Vitra, carried out urban studies for the Philips corporation in Eindhoven, and made installations for the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
He continued to make editioned work, most recently for the New York gallery Friedman Benda, which showed a collection of his new pieces this year which built on Animali Domestici. “The thing that interested me in objects made from tree branches is that they are unrepeatable. By making them in series, it could be understood as the invention of a new kind of mass production. Today the difference between art and design is disappearing, it’s becoming fuzzy.”
He is survived by Nicoletta and their three daughters, Lorenza, Orsola and Elena.
• Andrea Branzi, architect and designer, born 30 November 1938; died 9 October 2023
