Benjamin Pardo and David Gresham are passionate collectors and trained architects and industrial designers with decades of experience in the design industry.
Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including
The New York Times,
Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo was president of the Italian manufacturer Unifor for 17 years before joining Knoll in 2005, where he remained for over 15 years and served as a senior vice president and design director, redefining everything from their global product portfolio to the company’s showrooms and retail architecture. Over the course of his career he has collaborated with and guided the work of Marc Newson, Piero Lissoni, Antonio Citterio and countless others, and curated and renewed the work of Florence Knoll, Mies Van Der Rohe, Harry Bertoia, and George Nakashima, to name but a few. Now, he is a professor of interior architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Pardo’s partner, award-winning designer David Gresham, worked as vice president of design at Fitch, Steelcase, and Wet Design and, since 2011, has run his own design consulting business. Gresham also co-founded Design Logic while a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1980s, a short-lived but influential company that helped change the design landscape and practices in the United States and abroad. Altogether, Pardo and Gresham’s work and interviews have been featured in over thirty publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, Elle Décor, and Architectural Digest.
Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another...
The couple’s considerable experience with design and architecture informs their impeccable ability to combine a variety of modern objects, furniture, and art into what has been described as a cozy, livable form of modernism. They have a particular fondness for Ettore Sottsass’s designs and amassed an impressive array of his ceramics, furniture, and lighting, which they balance with Scandinavian and American modern pieces by Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Hans Wegner, and stark, geometric artworks by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Serra. While such an amalgamation of styles could become dissonant and overwhelming, Pardo and Gresham’s genuine love of architecture and design and nuanced understanding of how the two co-exist results in a harmonious, layered, visually stimulating collection in which various pieces riff off of one another: the black of Kelly’s geometric prints continues in the custom black Wegner valet chair and bench, Judd’s bright, hard-edged rectangles call to the architectonic, equally colorful Sottsass vases and teapots, Calder’s black, white, and red tapestry calls to the similarly hued but stylistically different metal flowers by Gherardo Frassa, and so on.
Pardo remarked in a 2008 interview about his and Gresham’s New York apartment that “you don’t want to look at superfluous things.” This thoughtful approach to building a space is evident in each and every work they acquired.
I don't think there's so much difference between reason and intuition. Intuition can sometimes be extremely rational.
Alvar Aalto
Alvar Aalto 1898–1976
Born in Kuortane, Finland, in 1898, Alvar Aalto began his formal training studying architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology. It was here that he met his future wife and collaborator, Aino Marsio who was also an architectural student in the program. The two were married in 1924. In 1929, Aalto won a competition to design a new sanatorium in Paimio for patients convalescing from tuberculosis; a total Gesamtkunstwerk, Aalto designed everything at Paimio, from the chairs to the sinks, to create a soothing and sanitary environment for the patients. In 1932, Aalto’s architectural drawings were featured in the landmark Modern Architecture: International Exhibition which was curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock and included the latest architectural innovations from around the globe. In 1935, Alvar and Aino Aalto, Nils-Gustav Hahl, and Maire Gullichsen formed the design company, Artek. In addition to a focus on practicality, the work of Artek is marked by its use of light-colored woods, organic forms, and biomorphic lines. Though, many of Aalto’s designs were imbued with playful elements like zebra prints and reindeer fur or bright pops of colored paint on the seats of his three-legged stools.
In 1936, Aalto won the Karhula-Iittala Glass Design Competition for the flowing and animated shape of his glass vase design and the following year he was invited to design the Finnish Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. His organic pavilion design won him international acclaim, and it led to a large retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1938. Later in his architectural career, Aalto would take on urban planning with his designs for the city centers of Seinäjoki and Rovaniemi in Finland. Aalto passed away in 1976, but he is renowned for his objects and buildings that combined the modernist style with an outstanding and authentic Finnish aesthetic.
Auction Results Alvar Aalto
