PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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Brionvega is the Milanese brand that in the 1960s turned radios and televisions into design objects. While the sets of the time were polished wooden cabinets, Brionvega's were cubes of coloured plastic that snapped open, televisions that looked upwards like a face, radiograms that resembled little robots.
From BP Radio to Brionvega
The company was founded in Milan in 1945 as BP Radio by Giuseppe Brion, his wife Onorina Tomasin and the engineer Leone Pajetta. At first it made electrical components and radios under the Vega brand, and from 1953 televisions too. The name changed several times: in 1960 the graphic designer Massimo Vignelli designed the Brion Vega logo, combining the owners' surname with the old brand, and in 1963 the final spelling, Brionvega, was adopted.
Zanuso and Sapper
The turning point came when the Brions entrusted their products to great designers. Marco Zanuso and the German Richard Sapper designed the most famous sets:
- the Doney television (1962), the first portable transistor television made in Europe, which won the Compasso d'Oro;
- the Algol television (1964), with its screen tilted upwards and a pull-out handle, now at MoMA;
- the TS 502 radio (1964), known as the “Cubo” radio: closed, it is a cube of coloured plastic; opened, it shows the loudspeaker on one side and the controls on the other;
- the Black ST 201 television (1969), a glossy black cube in which the screen can only be seen when it is switched on.
In 1965 Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed the RR 126 radiogram, with detachable side speakers and a control panel that looks like a face. Later Mario Bellini and Ettore Sottsass also worked for Brionvega.
Factories and architecture
The Brions' taste for design went beyond their products: the second factory, opened in 1965 at Casella d'Asolo, near Treviso, was designed by Zanuso. And after Giuseppe Brion's death in 1968, his wife Onorina commissioned Carlo Scarpa to design his tomb in the cemetery of San Vito d'Altivole: the Brion Tomb, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Italian architecture.
The brand today
From the 1980s the company went through difficult years. In 1992 it joined the Sèleco group of Pordenone, and in 1994 production stopped: Brionvega became just a brand. Since 2004 it has belonged to SIM2, a company from Friuli, which keeps the historic models alive: in 2019, for example, it reissued the Castiglionis' radiogram.
Sources
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