Time - Concept by Piero Lissoni

In the showroom at Via Durini 15, on the other hand, Porro is looking back and reconstructing its own history. From its foundation in Brianza in 1925, to the work with Munari in the 1960s - to which the company owes its logo and the Cubovo trolley, re-edited on this occasion - through the art direction entrusted to Piero Lissoni in 1989, up to the most well known collections of recent years, the Porro path of development is condensed into its main stages, to show that design has always been inherent in the DNA of the brand.

Not everybody knows that… the meeting between Porro and Bruno Munari dates back to 1966, on the occasion of a cycle of lectures held by the Milanese master at the Art School in Cantù: an immediate affinity, arising from sensibility, character and design attitudes that were in many ways common to both, prompted the company to approach the designer to give its brand a modern guise. The result is simple, intuitive and clever: the two letter “O”s contained in the word Porro become two screws seen from above, containing the company’s own most representative instrument of work in the symbol of a company all about the transformation of wood. And again from Munari came the decision to publish this logo in very small dimensions, mirroring the timidity and discretion - in life as in work - of the Porro family, which the designer wanted to respect and tell of indirectly. The second exchange with Munari took place in the 1990s, when the company, on the occasion of a retrospective on the artist in Cantù, created the first prototype of Cubovo, a trolley with lacquered wood and plate glass structure (dimensions: 52x52x60 cm) designed in 1962, it never entered production. An object with a strongly characterised design, with its compact form with 4 folding openings, which Porro has decided to bring to light today, re-issuing it in the 16 colours of their sample collection.

The history of Porro came alive with the productive collaboration with Piero Lissoni, art director since 1989, which in few years transformed a company with hand crafting origins into its current role as a successful industrial firm, creating that systems that are renewed year after year, which are the symbol of the minimal but highly elegant aesthetics of the brand. It is from one of his ideas - the transformation of furnishings created for the home into proposals for warmer, more pleasant and elegant working environments - that in 2006 Homework was born, the collection through which Porro extended its offer to the world of offices and business supplies, or that the most well known products in the catalogue were re-interpreted with interventions executed manually on the material, giving rise to the Material House collection in 2007. A niche offer, numbered furnishing items made patiently by hand one by one, taking Porro a step in front of other companies, thanks to the capacity to offer something extra to the most attentive and sensitive consumers: a handicraft object, from the workshop, precious for its uniqueness.

The opening of recent years towards designers from outside the company, particularly Christophe Pillet and Jean Marie Massaud, has further enriched the Porro catalogue: a choral offer where we read a number of hands, harmonious yet cohesive for image and capable of satisfying the most demanding tastes together.

This whole path of development is told with a few select words and many objects. A stream of consciousness where past, present and future follow in succession in a continuous thread, and where prototypes, studies, industrial products and limited editions are mixed freely, highlighting how every project has always been handled with the same passion and devotion, the same meticulous attention to detail that makes the rigorous and neat style of the company identifiable at first glance, today as then.

4 masonry platforms at different heights propose 10 black and white Cubovos trolleys, while the master’s thought is remembered through his most famous sentences, such as “To complicate is easy, to simplify is difficult” or “Tree: the slow explosion of a seed”, which perfectly translate the mental attitude, the approach to the project and the history of Porro, traced in small but ever more rapid steps.

Present and future are told by the most well known products in the catalogue, such as the Synapsis table presented in a maxi-size variant measuring 7 metres with strong material impact, the Endless Shelf bookcases, Bibliotech and Load-It, the system of wardrobes, open wardrobes and Storage cabinets, the Boxes chest of drawers, the hand- finished pieces of Material House (such as Spindle seats with elastic), and the more recent solutions of Homework, which combine Work chests of drawers with RAM tables and HT work containers. Finally, the latest Porro innovation: the “cockpit” armchair Conch designed by Decoma Design, available on a rotating metal base. From the dining room to the office, Conch is characterised by its pleasant oval form, the softness of its removable fabric covers and its design with an elegant central groove.

Finally, the 5 shop windows of the showroom are devoted to the logo designed by Munari, where it is coloured, distorted, highlighted, handled, re-interpreted freely and without hesitation and published, for the first time without timidity, in a maxi format.

In its over 80 years of history, Porro is now an established name, aware of the role that it has been able to earn itself step by step on the panorama of contemporary design. A company that maintains its small dimensions compared to the large groups, but that year after year keeps on growing and attracting the attention with its own cohesive work.

That's why in 2008 Porro can allow itself the luxury of playing and having fun with its own brand.  Before launching itself into new challenges and in search of new targets…