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.
Bruno Munari 1907–1998
A prolific artist, writer, inventor, architect, illustrator, and titan of design, Bruno Munari is known as one of the greatest protagonists of 20th century art, design, and graphics. Born in Milan, he spent much of his childhood and teenage years in the quaint and rural town of Badia Polesine; this exposure to both city and country life would later become fundamental in the development of his aesthetic. In 1927 at the age of 20, Munari became involved with the Futurist movement, embarking on an over seven-decade-long career which would leave an indelible imprint on the design world.
The Futurists’ focus on progress and modernity was fertile ground for the young Munari, who desired to develop new modes of visual communication. During his association with the Futurist movement, he worked as a graphic designer and an art director, began designing children’s books, and developed his Macchina aerea (Aerial Machine) and Macchine inutili (Useless Machines) both of which exhibited his unique ability to blur the lines between machines, art, and utility. Following World War II, Munari broke with the Futurists due to their proto-Fascist leanings and in 1948 he founded Movimento Arte Concreta (M.A.C.), the Italian movement for concrete art, with Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Atanasio Soldati. Over the next decade, prior to the disbanding of M.A.C. in 1958, Munari explored kinetic art, experimented with polarized light, produced several films, and designed countless objects for Italian design companies such as Danese Milano.
Auction Results Bruno Munari
