Brionvega celebrates over 50 years of radio.cubo design history with the radio.cubo 50° edition. Brionvega steadily demonstrates a unique and intriguing approach to design, as evidenced by its recent collaboration with American lifestyle brand Supreme, which reinterpreted the modern classic with its iconic logo as well as a bold red.
www.instagram.com/brionvega
www.brionvega.it
A remake of a cult object of Italian design: the legendary radio.cubo TS502 was designed by Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso. In the early 1960s, began an important collaboration between German designer Richard Sapper and the designer and architect Marco Zanuso, a partnership that would last for many years.
Brionvega, an Italian electronics company which aimed to compete with Japanese and German producers, commissioned Sapper and Zanuso to create several radio and television sets. These products soon became icons of Italian design.
In 1962 the Doney television was born from the pencil of Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper, winner of the Compasso d’Oro. This is the first fully transistorized television in Europe.
In 1964 they signed the Algol TV, with an organic shape characterized by the inclination of the front part of the bodywork, which ends with the screen, allowing viewing even when the device is placed on the ground.
Also in 1964, they invented an absolute masterpiece of Made in Italy design. Designed in 1962 and marketed since 1964, the Brionvega Cubo is the radio that changed the radio: coloured and no longer grey, with a shape never seen before, a synthesis of technology, in a cube that opens in half!
Reliability and ease of use, durability and beauty, technology and design, ergonomics and chromatic vivacity. These are just some of the features of the TS502 transistor radio, better known as the Brionvega cubo.
Made following long research on the shapes that furnishing complements and accessories should take to try to keep up with the times, thus adapting not only to the new style of furniture but also to new needs.
The lines and colours would in fact trace the style of furniture that was fashionable during those years, while the portable device would represent the desire for freedom, joy and practicality.
The idea of the designers was to integrate the object into the domestic environment, exhibiting it and not hiding it, making it become the protagonist of the environment: a coloured object and no longer grey, with a shape, never seen before, a synthesis of technology in two shells. Not a static and self-referential object created to show its function as the electronics products of the time were, but light, portable and with a playful and innovative character even in the materials used.
The TS502 can best be defined as the essence of design, a model that since the 1960s has become the protagonist of the international scene and exhibited in major contemporary art museums (MoMa – New York, La Jolla, Osaka e San Paolo). An immortal icon, an important and avant-garde point of reference in the field of industrial design, with which it is still difficult to measure oneself today.
The radio is made of plastic and zamak and consists of two parts. Its particular shape has a very specific function: when it is open it allows you to interact with the typical functions of the radio, when it is closed it becomes compact and can be transported in a simple and safe way.
