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.
