Guido Drocco & Franco Mello

Guido Drocco (1942-) and Franco Mello (1945-) are a duo of Italian designers remembered mainly for having co-signed one of the most famous pieces in the history of Radical Design, the iconic Cactus produced by Gufram in 1972. However, their careers followed divergent paths: Guido Drocco, originally from the province of Cuneo, spent most of his career in the field of architecture (mainly for the Gabetti & Isola studio, for which he began working since 1962), while Franco Mello, Genoese by birth but active in Turin, has concentrated most of his activities in the field of graphic design and artistic publishing, supervising catalogs and posters of numerous artists such as Piero Manzoni, Alberto Burri and Yves Klein. The first of the two to approach furniture design was Guido Drocco, co-author together with the Gatti-Paolini-Teodoro trio (who would later sign another great icon of Radical Design, the Sacco armchair by Zanotta) of a storage unit rotating produced by Abet Laminati and awarded at the International Furnishings Exhibition in Monza. Between 1969 and 1970 both Drocco and Mello worked with Gufram, individually signing their products. The collaboration between the two took place between 1971 and 1973 and, in addition to the aforementioned Cactus, will give rise to products such as the Trampolino table, produced by the Colli 2 brand in 1971, and a series of toys published by Gufram.