Design is dead. Long live design.

When the British design critic and author Alice Rawthorn first met Enzo Mari in the early 2000s, he was giving a packed-out lecture at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Well, we say "lecture". In classic Mari style, the presentation quickly devolved into more of a sardonic rant against capitalism, consumerism – in fact, most of the isms – and the inevitable decline of western civilisation. (Mari was a card-carrying Marxist, and proud of it.)

Afterwards, Rawthorn asked Mari if there was anything about contemporary life he actually liked. The great designer thought for a few seconds, then said, "Bread and terrorism". Rawthorn was aghast. Why terrorism, she asked. "Why not?" Mari scoffed. "People think it's bad, but if they thought about it, they'd realise it isn't all bad. It changes things."

This is perhaps the most enduring legacy of the late, great Enzo Mari (1932–2020). Whatever else you might think about his politics, his design philosophy, his full-frontal rudeness – he famously called the noted Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas a "pornographic window dresser" – and his habit of chain-smoking noxious, unfiltered cigarettes down to the nub, not even his fiercest critics would label him boring. Enzo Mari changed design forever and for always. Not through terrorism, it should be stressed, but through pure unfiltered rage, which he channelled into a superhot stream of philosophical napalm, aimed squarely at the mainstream design establishment. If Mattel ever made an Enzo Mari doll (something Mari would have fought against tooth and nail) and you pulled the string on its back, two catchphrases would emerge: "Form is everything" and "Design is dead".

So let's talk output. Because this could take a while. Enzo Mari was arguably the most influential and productive post-war Italian designer of all time¹. His career spanned six decades and more than 2000 individual projects: everything from multifunctional daybeds, chairs and children's toys to puzzles, injection-moulded vases and industrial fruit bowls.

Born to a poor family in Novara, Italy, as a child he scraped a living selling soap in the marketplace. When his father fell ill, Mari dropped out of school and worked as a bricklayer and sign painter. By the 1950s, he'd enrolled in Milan's Brera Academy, where he jumped from painting to sculpture to stage design (leaving a string of exhausted, pissed-off teachers in his wake). This was before Italy's post-war manufacturing boom; a somewhat stodgy time, design-wise, still dominated by old-guard figures like Achille Castiglione and Marco Zanuso.

The young Mari stumbled into his calling almost by accident: "After I had designed several objects," he said, "someone told me that what I was doing was design." It wasn't a conscious thing, but by the late 1950s, and with the ink still wet on his diploma, Mari was emerging as one of the hottest talents on the continent, designing products and furniture for Italy's biggest manufacturers. Names like Zanotta, Driade, Alessi and Danese Milano, the last of which he partnered with to produce his famous children's puzzle, 16 Animali (1957) – a menagerie of 16 interlocking wooden animals cut from a single piece of oak using one continuous jigsaw line. Each animal tessellates together seamlessly, as if by magic, and they happen to contain everything you need to know about Enzo Mari's philosophy.

Mari prized clarity and economy in design above all else. He loathed gimmickry and ornamentation². In his graphic print series, Serie della Natura, for example, he boiled apples, pears, panthers and bears down to their most basic, Platonic forms³. He also had more respect for the creative power of children than actual designers. He once told an interviewer, "I'd give a Nobel Prize to every kid that turns a year and a half."

For Mari, design was a battleground, not some tacky commodity. A way of moving the world forwards. And you couldn't separate the designer from their politics any more than you could separate them from their designs. In the war for hearts and minds, there was no such thing as 'neutral'. "The designer cannot fail to have his own ideology of the world," he said. "If he has none, he is a fool who only gives shape to other people's ideas." Mari had nothing but contempt for trend disciples, or those who churned out mass-market commercial furniture. You got the sense he'd rather disagree with your principles than discover you had none.

It was this democratic spirit that informed perhaps Mari's most famous and radical contribution to design: Proposta per un'Autoprogettazione (1974), also known simply as Autoprogettazione. A proposal for "Self-Design".

Autoprogettazione was a typed DIY furniture manual-cum-manifesto that Mari offered to mail to anyone who was interested (he only asked that they pay postage). Inside were drawings and step-by-step diagrams for a full set of domestic furniture – tables, chairs, beds, shelves and storage. All solid, economical and designed without flourish or adornment. Each piece could be built from common lumber (2x2s and planks) using nothing more than hammer and nails. The brief, in typical Mari fashion, was blunt: "Cheap, high quality, long-lasting." And to these parameters he added one more: "If someone tried to build something, they would learn something."

Autoprogettazione was Mari's attempt to undermine the mainstream manufacturing industry and get people to make furniture for themselves. Or even think for themselves. Sort of the flat-pack version of Das Kapital. It was open-source code before GitHub was a thing. And just like open-source software, the point was less that users should slavishly follow Mari's blueprints and more that they try new things. Experiment. Create. It was also a huge international success. Within a year, Mari had received over 5000 letters requesting a copy of Autoprogettazione, and people began sending him photos of their rustic, handmade pieces, even if the man himself remained curmudgeonly nonplussed about the whole thing. "In 99 per cent of cases," he grumbled, "it was not understood or misunderstood."

Quotes like this are why it's hard to talk about Enzo Mari without mentioning his many (many) contradictions. He was a designer for the people, but he held most people in contempt. A lifelong Marxist whose pieces now adorn the homes of the rich and famous. An anti-consumerist who filled the world with stuff. A DIY enthusiast who hated IKEA (or at least the cheaply made, mass-produced, corporate juggernaut IKEA became). A gifted designer who firmly believed the world needed less design. "If I design an ashtray," he said once, "it needs to be very stable, easy to wash, reliable and good for putting out a cigarette. Even if the best ashtray possible is not owning an ashtray."

The truth is, Mari's anti-materialist stance often clashed with the reality that many of his works became highly sought-after, collectible and (let's be frank) expensive. And not just after his death. Even Autoprogettazione, the goal of which was to empower people to understand how things are made, rather than passively consume expensive stuff, even that became tainted and commercialised: original Mari beds and tables now fetch thousands at auction.

And yet the democratic spirit of Autoprogettazione, and Mari, endures. In 2024, four years after the great man's death, London's Design Museum hosted the Grazie Enzo Exhibition, which showcased designers whose work shared an affinity with Mari's. It was a love letter to all things honest, simple and sculptural. Design firms like Complete Thought Studio in Australia have updated the original Autoprogettazione schematics, scaling them down for children and releasing them for free. East London's multi-disciplinary firm, Studiomama, founded by Jack Mama and Nina Tolstrup, lists Mari as a key influence, and you can see the fingerprints of 16 Animali in their 2024 project, Offcuts – a series of kooky wooden creatures, all made from scraps leftover from other projects.

It's important to note that Mari hated all these contradictions, even as he toiled away inside them. It wasn't hypocrisy, as such. Mari understood better than most the fundamental tragedy of all art, which is that designers can never fully control how their work is used, or valued, and that even anti-consumerist gestures can get co-opted by the system – if they're good enough. And Mari's designs were definitely good enough. When you make something beautiful, it doesn't belong to you anymore, not really.

This is what Mari meant by “Design is dead”. He wasn’t saying creativity is finished, but rather that capitalism had warped design into another tool of consumption and control. It was a warning for designers to wake up. Part obituary, part rallying cry.

It's no wonder Mari was often referred to as "the conscience of design"; by 2020, when he sadly died of COVID-19 complications, he'd become the de facto moral compass of the entire industry. If Enzo Mari liked your stuff, it meant you were making something good. Ethically rigorous. New and original. It meant you were changing things.

And this is the final, fundamental contradiction at the centre of Enzo Mari. Beneath the cigarettes and the cynicism, beneath the caustic manners and angry Marxist tirades – there beat the heart of an idealist. It's become a bit corny to say that design can change the world, and yet Enzo Mari really believed it. Right down in his soul. And he wanted other people to believe it too – and to do something about it.

"An object should, in some way, improve people," he always said. "People say the world can't be changed, it's heading this way, we must accept it. They are monstrously pessimistic to be speaking like that.

"They always accuse me of being pessimistic, but I'm the only optimist I know."

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¹ There are a few names fighting for that title but Enzo Mari and Italian design go together like gravity and rocks. We wouldn’t even have the latter without the former.

² It probably goes without saying, but Mari did not like his fellow Italian maverick, Ettore Sottsass, or the Memphis school in general. He saw their postmodern, highly stylized work as superficial and commercial — the opposite of his own politically charged design ethos. While Sottsass embraced decoration and irony, Mari forged ahead with functionality, clarity and red-blooded Marxist revolution.

³ His apple, in particular, is probably the apple-iest apple ever committed to paper; the distilled essence of pure apple-ness.