The evolution in the world of receivers, from the first valve radios to the most modern equipment, is on display at the ADI Design Museum in Milan: an exhibition that radio enthusiasts simply cannot miss, to discover devices and the rivalry between Italian and German designs, as well as when the first FM radio was produced in Italy. FM-world interviewed the curator of the exhibition, designer Davide Vercelli.

Radio is Queen

Years ago, the phrase Content is King was popular, suggesting that content is what matters in the media world. Perhaps, but we – and we are sure many of our readers—are or have been passionate about the container too, the “Radio” device itself.

After all, if we look at old covers of Radiocorriere (Italian equivalent of UK “Radio Times”), we see that in the past, the receiver often graced the cover, instead of hosts or singers.

Harmony of Line, Purity of Voice

It is less known that, as you will see in Milan, many of these devices bear the signatures of prestigious designers and architects such as Le Corbusier, the Castiglioni brothers, Zanuso, and many others.

The ADI Design Museum in Milan  has therefore decided to host the first leg of the exhibition titled “Radio Design: The Aesthetic Evolution of Radio Devices“, curated by Davide Vercelli.

We couldn’t resist the temptation to speak with him directly: we requested and obtained the contact through the museum’s management. Here is the account of the interview  that took place on Monday, September 2, 2024. For those who prefer, the  original audio (in Italian) is available here .

The Interview

M.H.B.-FMworld: For those who don’t know you, could you give a brief introduction?

Davide Vercelli: I am an engineer deviated towards creativity, meaning I have an engineering background but have never worked as an engineer: instead, I design objects for companies. I also manage part of the collective events for Arte Fiera, always in Bologna. **I am passionate about radio design** and started a collection specifically dedicated to the design of devices connected in some way to music **about 30 years ago**.

M.H.B.-FMworld: We’ve read that the collection of pieces on display is yours, not items found on the market or in other museums…

Davide Vercelli: Yes, that’s right. Over the years, I even had to buy a warehouse to manage the devices I gradually gathered. There is a writer named Walter Benjamin who wrote wonderful things about collecting and compares us to Sisyphus, moving one stone after another to the top of the mountain only to bring it down again. Objects are like that. So, most of the displayed objects are mine, except for two or three for which I involved collector friends.

The Exhibition

M.H.B.-FMworld: Tell us what we can expect in Milan.

D.V.: So, among the many possibilities presented to us, I wanted to tell stories that somehow crossed Italian and European society from the beginnings of radio onwards.

Specifically, there are nine stories covering specific themes. Part of it is an epic of some European companies that have made radio history: **Braun**, which before making toothbrushes, did wonderful things, first with Hans Gugelot, then with the Ulm School, and later with Dieter Rams (read this from CNN), creating beautiful, perhaps unsurpassed, audio products from 1957 onwards.

One of Braun’s most famous creations is the so-called “Snow White’s Coffin” (Braun SK55), a radio-phonograph designed to be placed in the center of a room. It didn’t have a back panel like all other devices, but for the first time used transparent polycarbonate to reveal rather than conceal the turntable, a design element that has since been adopted in all stereo systems still using a turntable.

Ducati

Then there’s **Ducati**, which before becoming famous for motorcycles, produced electromechanical components and  in the 1940s produced a series of three radios in light veneer wood, at a time when everything was dark, walnut, dark wood.

**A perfect line that is still avant-garde today**, and one in particular—one that isn’t mine—is affectionately called the “papal radio.”

It’s a wonderful example of elegance to behold, with a green scale and green knobs, from the 1940s, made of light veneer wood, anticipating Northern European design.

Space Age

Then we tell more intimate stories, not related to big companies but that have crossed society, such as Space Age, the influence that science fiction and space travel had on general design, on radio and device design. Therefore, Sputnik shapes, round forms, or rocket shapes, the use of materials like chrome, glossy plastics—one of the slots is dedicated to Space Age.

Giò Ponti

Then we tell the story of Giò Ponti (the architect of the building chosen by Hazan for the headquarters of RMC Italy, Radio 105 and Virgin Radio, now RadioMediaset Ed. Note), who in 1930, thundered in his magazine against radio manufacturers saying that they were only capable of putting an electronic device inside a Tudor or Queen Anne style cabinet suitable only for American cottages, with no need to structure a rationalist architecture.

So he stimulated, with *La voce del padrone* (His Master’s Voice), a manufacturing company, a competition won by Figini and Pollini, two modernist architects who began working with Giò Ponti’s studio and designed this radio called **Domus, a small masterpiece of architecture**.

A Rationalist Building and Variable Geometries

A perfectly squared parallelepiped, white knobs, an extremely basic layout of controls, it looks like a miniature rationalist building with an ebony veneer, making it extremely refined, a total beauty. We are showcasing the January 1933 issue of Domus, where this competition was announced.
We also enjoyed telling stories, there are variable geometries, all those devices like the TS 502, the Radio Cubo, which we deliberately do not represent in the Brionvega slot but in the variable geometries slot because it was the forerunner of these objects that could be modified by the user.

Together with some devices, for example, there’s a stereo system by Wega (designer Werner Panton), a German brand, which also has two portions that rotate on each other to reveal the turntable.

Italy vs. Germany

I would also like to recall the Italy vs. Germany debate on popular radio. While the two regimes needed to spread their ideology and create national unity, in Italy and Germany, the governments moved with very different principles, with effectiveness and extremely opposing aesthetic results, I would say, a significant example of a different design approach between our two peoples that still persists today.

M.H.B.-FMworld: Can you explain better? What do you mean?

D.V.: I mean that at the time, we issued an edict in which we involved 12 companies and gave some general guidelines; the radio had to have these characteristics, receive certain stations, and have this more or less specific shape.

So, what happened? In Italy, everyone made a radio more or less as they wanted, they are distinguishable, recognizable, it’s called a rural radio because of the ornamentation, as the characteristic ornament is a wheat ear in aluminum on the front of the radio, but substantially even from an electrical standpoint, each producer, all 11 or 12 of them, placed inside a device they had slightly modified.

In Germany, being German: the radio must be this, a mold made by Basf in Bakelite, the same for everyone, and the electronic design revolved around a single valve. So, identical housing for everyone, molded in Bakelite, with a single-valve electronic system, and this allowed them, with this extreme rationalization of production, to make a radio that cost very little and distribute millions of them: the Volksempfänger.

So much so that, within a few years, 70% of the German population had a popular German radio in their home.

Our radios, beautiful, are truly wonderful, but with limited production and exclusively dedicated to schools and rural entities, unions, and various things.

So we thought of reaching a young population mainly through schools, while they aimed to mass-distribute the radio.

In terms of effectiveness, we were somewhat on the losing side.

50 kW

M.H.B.-FMworld: So Mussolini was inaugurating “the most powerful transmitter in Europe”, 50 kW in Rome, but in the end, there were no people who could listen to it?
D.V.: Exactly. An interesting thing we did, however, was to direct our radio towards the youth population, so to schools. There was a monthly periodical that scheduled weekly educational broadcasts. The schools followed those broadcasts that aired in the morning, around 10 AM, with topics like Italy’s mission in Ethiopia or the airplane and the aviator. Complete with a magazine and, above all, a huge poster that was hung in schools, graphically illustrating the lesson content.

M.H.B.-FMworld: A fundamentally different philosophy between the two peoples…

D.V.: Exactly. And this different approach to design is also reflected in the comparison between Braun and Brionvega. They are there for that reason: Braun, with Dieter Rams: total minimalism, white colors, total absence of decorative elements, and a production line that, from ’57 until the ’80s, can be easily identified. Brionvega, on the other hand, exploded with vibrant colors, plastics, and identifiable but very different models. This design approach is somehow ours and still belongs to the present times between Italy and Germany.

La La La Radio

D.V.: There’s also a section dedicated to more modern radios, up to the ’80s, with pieces by Philippe Starck, which we placed in the section dedicated to “outsiders”. These are devices that, although important, do not belong to the major groups identified earlier. Starck worked with companies like Alessi and Telefunken, and designed interesting radios like “La La La Radio,” which is essentially a large cone emphasizing the speaker, with very small controls. It was produced in 7,000 numbered units, and we have one on display.

M.H.B.-FMworld: Are these devices operational? Do you run them during the exhibition?

D.V.: Almost all of them are operational because my main interest is to disassemble the devices and restore them conservatively.

However, none of them work here, because they are very old and do not meet current safety standards, so we preferred to consider them as a museum display. But we would like, perhaps at some opening phase, to run one to show how they sounded back then….

M.H.B.-FMworld: …But absolutely! Then in Milan, there are still one or maybe two private stations on OM…

D.V.: Exactly, few stations on OM after RAI stopped broadcasting there on September 11, two years ago, dismantling the antennas. It’s a choice that made many enthusiasts angry.

The First FM Radio

M.H.B.-FMworld: When was FM introduced in Italian devices?
D.V. At the end of 1949, taking advantage of the attention that the frequency modulation sector was attracting (following the emerging development of television), Imca, a company from Alessandria, launched the first series of frequency modulation receiving devices on the market: the radio was called Pangamma, with a very beautiful round mirror scale.

Italian High-Tech Design Today

M.H.B.-FMworld: One last question: devices such as virtual helmets – Metaquest or Apple Vision Pro – are, in a way, the evolution of radio and TV, considering that the “use case” is widely considered to be entertainment. But in these areas, Italy doesn’t seem to have a significant role…
D.V.: Unfortunately, no. There are no Italian, or even European, companies that work significantly in this field. This is also one of the reasons why we don’t get requests to design electronic devices. Since the early ’90s, this crisis has hit all European manufacturing companies, and now everything is in the hands of the large U.S. and Asian tech companies, which often do not approach design as we understand it. It’s sad, but it’s a reality.

M.H.B.-FMworld: To conclude, can you tell us the dates and details of the exhibition in Milan and Bologna? And are there plans to take it abroad?

D.V.: Certainly. The opening in Milan is on September 5th at the ADI Design Museum, running until September 27th. Then we’ll move from October 4th to October 31st to Bologna, at the Fondazione Cirulli. The foundation is a venue that perfectly aligns with the theme, being the former production site of Dino Gavina, designed by the Castiglioni brothers. After that, there are contacts to take the exhibition to other cities, both in Italy and abroad, but I can’t confirm anything yet. We’re looking at 2025 for a third location.

ADI Design Museum The ADI Design Museum is in Piazza Compasso d’Oro, in the Paolo Sarpi area of Milan. The museum is open from 10:30 AM to 8:00 PM; access to this particular exhibition is free. Inside, the museum houses the historical collection of the Compasso d’Oro. (M.H.B. for FM-world)