On Dec. 10, Porro will celebrate Christmas at its showroom in Milan (via Durini 15). The company will simultaneously start the celebrations for its 90th birthday, which will continue throughout 2015, with a collection of wooden spinning tops designed by Piero Lissoni.
The five models – with alternate colour tones, and with theme variations coming in several combinations of materials and woods – are handmade. A child’s toy that is also loved by adults, it enchants with its shapes, materials and colours.
Porro was founded in 1925 in Brianza, the traditional birthplace of Italian quality furniture, when the brothers Giulio and Stefano Porro established their first workshop dedicated to the production of old-style pieces of furniture produced for the new Milanese bourgeoisie.
The company turned to modern style in the ’50s with the transition to the second generation of Porro family, the cousins Carlo, Arturo and Silvio.
Porro worked with some of the most important Italian designers of the period, such as Bruno Munari, commissioned to create the company’s logo in 1966.
In the mid-’80’, with the entrance of the third generation, Lorenzo, Fabio, Giovanni and Danilo Porro, design assumed a leading role in the company: the professional liaison with Piero Lissoni, Porro art director since 1989, began in that period. A graduate of Architecture from Politecnico di Milano, Lorenzo Porro brings the attention for design and the taste for geometrical forms: in the ’90s, the brand specializes in modular systems for living and sleeping areas, for home and office areas, currently constituting 70 per cent of production.
Porro distinguishes itself for its innate capacity to select, work and interpret wood, proposing a particularly broad and accurate range of finishes and articulating it in an always-new manner, calling upon the most recent technologies for glossy and matt lacquers, or rather rediscovering prized manufacturing techniques from the past.
Together with designers such as the Swedish Front and Alessandro Mendini, the company has been able to provide a modern interpretation of ancient traditions, such as carving, curved wood, inlay and the combination of wooden slats creating quality projects, as evidenced by the EDIDA, ELLE DECO INTERNATIONAL DESIGN AWARDS, assigned both to the Gentle chair prized as Best Seating 2013, and to the Mikado cupboard, awarded Best Furniture 2014.
With this collection of spinning tops, Porro explores turnery, whose design is expressed through free sculpted shapes, with an apparently simple result, which proves to be extremely refined both technically and aesthetically.
Carrying on this course of research on the material and starting from the theme of “containing” typical of its work on systems, Porro will celebrate the important milestone of its 90th birthday with a collection of wooden boxes designed by those who over the years have contributed to the success of the company, together with new names chosen from the worlds of art and decoration, invited to freely use the 16 essences of the new collection of Porro woods playing with shapes and experimenting with particular modes of opening.
The Porro wooden boxes will be presented at different times throughout 2015, at major international events.
For more info about the company, visit http://www.porro.com/