Mario Bellini (born 1 February 1935 in Milan) is an Italian architect and industrial designer who graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1959.
He has won the Compasso d’Oro eight times — among the most ever awarded to a single designer — and was honoured with the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Triennale di Milano. Twenty-five of his works are held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which dedicated a personal retrospective to him in 1987 (“Mario Bellini: Designer”).
His furniture designs include the Camaleonda modular sofa for B&B Italia (1970, reissued 2020), the Le Bambole sofa series for B&B Italia (1972, awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1979), the Cab chair for Cassina (1977) — the first chair to feature a self-supporting leather skin assembled from sixteen saddle-leather panels over a minimal metal frame — and the Kar-a-Sutra mobile environment prototype (1972). His architectural work spans Villa Erba in Cernobbio (1990), the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (2003), the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2012), and Palazzo Citterio in Milan (opened December 2024).
Portrait: Elena Marko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
