Mendini called himself "a novelist who writes on objects".  His love of literature was immense and his Proust Chair, one of his most famous designs, is an ode to Marcel Proust, inventor of the modern novel.  The armchair with baroque curls is hand-painted with a pointillistic landscape à la Paul Signac, a contemporary of artist Proust.  In 2015, Magis produced a plastic version of the chair.  

As an innovator in the field of material use, Mendini entered into a partnership in 2017 with the plastic manufacturer Ecopixel. He had tiles made up mostly of recycled polyethylene in eight colours and 2.4 centimeters square.  He mixed and melted them, then pressed them into the shape of a chaise longue.  Each copy has a unique pattern. And they are all recyclable.

The museum was a gift to the city of Groningen on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Gasunie.  Director Frans Haks wanted something spectacular and so contacted Mendini.  The master himself designed the gold-coloured entrance building.  Philippe Starck was responsible for the drum-shaped pavilion and Frank Stella would have been responsible for the size of the third building, but his design in simple teflon proved in the end to be too expensive.  The Austrian agency Coop Himmelb(l)au eventually developed an alternative.

This building is considered to be one of the best examples of post-modern architecture and was included in the guide “1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die” (2015).  Mendini made use of the ‘cadavre exquis’ method, invented by the surrealistic poets around André Breton.  They complemented each other's words with random fragments of text.  Mendini created a cold fusion of extremely different pavilions designed by different architects.

"Ornament is crime" was more or less stated by modernist architect Adolf Loos in a famous essay from 1913.  Seventy years later he was ridiculed by Mendini.  In his designs for mosaic manufacturer Bisazza, Mendini went to the furthest in his passion for decoration.  The three geometric patterns are inspired by Arabic, Italian and Northern European examples. And as a bonus, he went beyond the golden tiles.

Mendini had a weakness for totems, objects with no apparent function but with great symbolic power.  He designed several throughout his career.  He placed his best known piece in 2016 in the Cité Radieuse apartment at Le Corbusier in Marseille.  A pleasant taunt directed towards the chief of modernist architecture.