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.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh 1868–1928
Perhaps no other name is more entwined with the Glasgow Style than Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Born in Glasgow in 1868, he apprenticed as a young man with local architect John Hutchison before transferring to the larger city practice of Honeyman & Keppie. At the same time, Mackintosh also enrolled in evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, pursuing various drawing programs and honing his skills by studying all the latest architectural and design journals in the school’s library. A talented and diligent student, he won numerous prizes including the prestigious Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship in 1890, which afforded him the opportunity to take an architectural tour of Italy. Mackintosh proved to be quite the rising star at Honeyman & Keppie, designing the Glasgow Herald Building in 1894 and the Martyr’s Public School in 1895. In 1896, he won the commission that would become his masterwork: designing a new building for the Glasgow School of Art.
Mackintosh was a fierce believer in artistic freedom and independence, and his work exhibited an eclectic mix of styles and influences. This is not altogether surprising given where he lived. Glasgow was a prosperous production center of heavy engineering and shipbuilding, and like so many cosmopolitan European cities at the time, it teemed with a fertile combination of industrialization, emerging modernist ideas, as well as Asian style. Toward the late 19th century, Japan’s isolationist regime loosened its reins slightly, opening themselves to globalization and leading to a Japanese influence in decorative arts around the world. Mackintosh was particularly fond of the developing Japoniste style and its simple forms, natural elements, and its tendency toward restraint over ostentation. He combined this simplicity with the innovative ideas and new technologies of modernism, references to Scottish architecture, and sometimes even the subtle curves of Art Nouveau (as seen in his famous Mackintosh Rose motif) into a unique visual language all his own.
The originality of Mackintosh’s style was well-received in much of Europe, especially in Austria and Germany. He participated in the 8th Vienna Secession as well as international exhibitions in Turin and Moscow. Despite his success abroad, his work was not nearly as popular in his home country and he relied primarily on a small handful of patrons and supporters for most of his commissions, among them Walter Blackie and Catherine Cranston. His career soon declined and around 1914 he and his wife moved to London, where his efforts to continue his work were curtailed by the first World War and related restrictions on building work. Mackintosh then moved to the South of France in 1923 where he spent the remaining years of his life painting until his death in 1928.
Auction Results Charles Rennie Mackintosh
