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.
Verner Panton 1926–1998
One of the most influential Danish designers of the 20th century, Verner Panton led a career filled with “firsts” and is perhaps most readily associated with the radical embrace of new materials and methods that defined much of the 1960s.
Panton was born in 1926 on the island of Fünen, Denmark. After serving in the military during World War II, Panton attended the Technical University of Odense, and then graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1951 with a degree in architecture. From 1950 to 1952, he worked under Arne Jacobsen, who served as a significant mentor to the designer. Panton followed his stint with Jacobsen for a series of road trips throughout Europe, in which he used his VW van as a mobile draughtsman’s studio and established significant connections in the international design community. In 1955, the celebrated Danish manufacturer Fritz Hansen launched the first production of a Panton design, the Bachelor Chair, followed by the Tivoli Chair.
One of Panton’s first major commissions was to redesign the inn that belonged to his parents, the Kom-igen inn. Begun in 1958, Panton’s redesign led to the development of his Cone Chair, and his work resulted in ongoing cooperation with multiple Danish manufacturers of furniture, textiles, and lighting. It was during this same decade that Panton became fascinated with developing a chair that could be made from a single element; his work towards this goal would eventually become the “S-chair,” or Stacking chair. This acclaimed design was finally realized in 1960 and was the world’s first single-form, injection-molded plastic chair. (It would later be produced by Thonet, as the first-ever cantilevered chair of molded plywood.) That same year, Panton designed the first inflatable seating made from plastic for his design for Norway’s Astoria Hotel restaurant.
Panton would go on to realize many major commissions, including the interior design of the Spiegel Publishing House and the 1979 Pantorama exhibition in Basel. Among his later commissions were the Vilbert Chair for IKEA and the Swatch Art Clock Tower for the Atlanta Olympic Summer Games in 1995. He passed away in 1998, and was celebrated with a retrospective at the Vitra Design Museum in 2000. He was a four-time winner of the International Design Award, among numerous other awards.
Auction Results Verner Panton
