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 served as editor of Domus from 1985 to 1991.
He has won the Compasso d’Oro eight times — among the most ever awarded to a single designer — and was honoured with the Triennale di Milano Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. 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, commissioned by MoMA for the 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. 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), Fiumicino T3 and the Antiquarium of the Roman Forum (2018), and Palazzo Citterio in Milan (opened December 2024).
Portrait: Elena Marko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
