Inception | 1967 |
---|---|
Manufacturer | Italtel |
Last production year | 1979 |
The Grillo telephone is a 1960s flip phone telephone from Italy. It was designed by Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso, and introduced in 1967. [1] The "Grillo" was manufactured by Italtel, a subsidiary former state-owned telecommunications company SIP (now part of Telecom Italia), and remained in production until 1979. [2] [3] It was a popular and iconic symbol of 1960s Italian design. [4] [5]
The modern styling, compact form factor, and automatically opening clamshell design set "Grillo" apart from other telephones that were available at the time. Innovative features that contributed to the phone's compact size include a dial that replaced the conventional rotary finger stop mechanism with a button in each of the number holes which, when actioned, pushed a pin through the back of the dial to stop the mechanism in its correct position.[ citation needed ] The incorporation of the ringer mechanism into the wall plug rather than the phone itself, and the use of a thin ABS plastic shell also helped reduce both its size and weight. [3] [6] [7] The name "Grillo", which means cricket in Italian, "derives from its shape and its chirping ringtone: an insect-like metallic chirp has replaced the harassing ring." [8] [9] [10]
"Grillo" was designed in 1965 by Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso, who, as a team, also collaborated with Italian companies such as Brionvega, Gavina, Kartell, and Alfa Romeo throughout the 1960s and 1970s. [11] [12] The design was awarded the 1967 Compasso d'oro in Milan and the Gold Medal at the 1968 Ljubljna Biennale of Design (BIO3). [13] [14] Examples are held in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the ADI Design Museum and Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia in Milan. [15] [16] [17] [2]
The "Grillo" would subsequently influence the design of flip phone mobile telephones developed during the 1990s like the Motorola StarTAC and RAZR, as well other electronic devices such as portable computers and games. [18]
The "Grillo" telephone appears in multiple episodes of the original 1960s Mission Impossible television series. [19]
The car phone depicted in the early 1970s American television series The Magician is a "Grillo" telephone.[ citation needed ]
Patrizia Reggiani (played by Lady Gaga) uses a "Grillo" telephone in the 2021 film House of Gucci .[ citation needed ]
Alessi is a housewares and kitchen utensil company in Italy, manufacturing and marketing everyday items authored by a wide range of designers, architects, and industrial designers — including Achille Castiglioni, Richard Sapper, Marco Zanuso, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Wiel Arets, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Hani Rashid, Tom Kovac, Greg Lynn, MVRDV, Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, Michael Graves, and Philippe Starck. The Alessi company in the UK is worth around £2.4 million.
Ettore Sottsass was an Italian architect. He was notable for his furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting, home and office ware designs as well as numerous buildings and interiors, often defined by bold colours.
The Ericofon is a one-piece plastic telephone created by the Ericsson Company of Sweden and marketed through the second half of the 20th century. It was the first commercially marketed telephone to incorporate the dial and handset into a single unit. Because of its styling and its influence on future telephone design, the Ericofon is considered one of the most significant industrial designs of the 20th century by Phaidon. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In Sweden, the Ericofon is known as the cobra telephone for its resemblance to the hooded snake of the same name.
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been part of TIM Group since 2003.
The Motorola Razr is a brand of design-oriented mobile phones manufactured by Motorola Mobility. Its current iteration since 2019, styled motorola razr, consist of foldable smartphones reminiscent of the original Razr line of flip phones.
A clamshell design is a kind of form factor for electronic devices in the shape of a clam shell. Mobile phones, handheld game consoles, and especially laptops, are often designed like clamshells. Clamshell devices are usually made of two sections connected by a hinge, each section containing either a flat panel display or an alphanumeric keyboard/keypad, which can fold into contact together like a bivalve shell.
The StarTAC is a series of mobile phones released by Motorola starting in 1996. It is the successor of the MicroTAC, a semi-clamshell design first launched in 1989. Whereas the MicroTAC's flip folded down from below the keypad, the StarTAC folded up from above the display. The StarTAC was among the first mobile phones to gain widespread consumer adoption; approximately 60 million StarTACs were sold.
The Compasso d'Oro is an industrial design award originated in Italy in 1954. Initially sponsored by the La Rinascente, a Milanese department store, the award has been organised and managed by the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (ADI) since 1964. The Compasso d'Oro is the first, and among the most recognized and respected design awards. It aims to acknowledge and promote quality in its field in Italy and internationally, and has been called both the "Nobel" and the "Oscar" of design.
Achille Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer of furniture, lighting, radiograms and other objects. As a professor of design, he advised his students "If you are not curious, forget it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they act, then being a designer is not the right job for you."
Brionvega is an Italian electronics company that is known for manufacturing futuristic television sets and audio equipment, its contributions to post-second world war technological and social advancement in Italian industry, collaborations with well known industrial designers and architects, and its impact on the aesthetics of 1960s Italian design.
Vico Magistretti was an Italian architect who was also active as an industrial designer, furniture designer, and academic. As a collaborator of humanist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of Magistretti's first projects was the "poetic" round church in the experimental Milan neighbourhood of QT8. He later designed mass-produced appliances, lighting, and furniture for companies such as Cassina S.p.A., Artemide, and Oluce. These designs won several awards, including the Compasso d'Oro and the Minerva Medal of the Chartered Society of Industrial Artists & Designers in 1986.
Richard Sapper was a German industrial designer who was based in Milan for much of his career. He is considered to be one of the most influential figures of post-war Italian design. His products typically feature a combination of technical innovation, simplicity of form, and an element of wit and surprise.
Marco Zanuso was an Italian modernist architect and designer.
Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known as Cini Boeri, was an Italian architect and designer. She was considered "one of the great pioneering women in Italian design and architecture", who was described as a "formidable architect and designer, paragon of Milanese elegance and verve."
Gianfranco Frattini was an Italian architect and designer. He is a member of the generation that created the Italian design movement in the late 1950s through the 1960s and is considered to have played a major role in shaping it.
Pier Giacomo Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer.
Italtel is an Italian multinational ICT company founded in 1921, originally as a branch of Siemens AG.
Andrea Branzi was an Italian architect, designer, and academic. He was born and raised in Florence, though he lived and worked in Milan for much of his career. He was a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan until 2009.
The IBM Leapfrog is a tablet computer prototype by IBM. It was designed by Sam Lucente and Richard Sapper. It is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It won the Compasso d'Oro in 1994. When the tablet computer was announced, it was mistakenly described by design magazines as a product that could be bought.
Livio Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer. He made a significant contribution to twentieth-century Italian lighting design and was an early proponent of the practice of industrial design in Italy.