PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
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Danese Milano is a small company that has had an enormous influence. Rather than large furniture, it has mainly produced objects to hold in the hand or keep on the desk, such as ashtrays, vases, calendars, pen holders and games, conceived as small lessons in design: simple, clever, often with a playful touch.
A publisher of objects
The company was founded in Milan in 1957 by Bruno Danese and Jacqueline Vodoz. More than an industry, Danese is a publisher: it chooses a few authors, follows each project carefully and takes the same care over packaging, graphics and shops. From the start its two main authors were two Milanese artists and designers, Bruno Munari and Enzo Mari, who would work with Danese for decades.
Munari
Bruno Munari designed some of the best-known objects in the catalogue: the Cubo ashtray (1957), a melamine box with a folded aluminium sheet inside that hides the ash; the Maiorca pen holder; and the Falkland pendant lamp, an elastic stocking stretched by metal rings that opens like a paper lantern when hung. From 1959 to 1976 Munari also created for Danese a long series of games and books for children, such as ABC, Labirinto and the Prelibri, which teach children to look at shapes and colours.
Mari
Enzo Mari presented his first design to Danese in 1957: the 16 Animals, a wooden puzzle in which sixteen animals fit perfectly together into a single block. Then came the Formosa perpetual wall calendar (1963), the reversible plastic Pago-Pago vase (1969), which can be used either way up, and the Putrella tray (1971), made from a piece of steel building girder bent up at the ends. The most famous is the Timor perpetual desk calendar (1967), with the dates on plastic flaps to flip through, which has never gone out of production.
Danese today
Over the years the catalogue has opened up to other designers and architects while keeping the same spirit. Today Danese Milano is a division of Artemide and still produces many of Munari's and Mari's historic pieces, alongside new objects, lamps and accessories for the home and office.
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