Unexpected Custom celebrates Berkel’s 120 years

A daily product that becomes lyrical, to the point of being placed in the flats of the new skyscrapers as a piece of industrial design, the Berkel flywheel slicer is born perfect in its linearity, thus unperfectable.
Just as the bicycle, the fountain pen, the mechanical clock.
And it has remained basically unchanged throughout the century which is the densest with events in human history.

Amid World Wars, the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire, the landing on the Moon, construction and destruction of Berlin Wall, sexual and digital revolutions, the flywheel has spun round like the wheel of time, without budging an inch in the middle of the storms of history.

The slicer’s shell, the same model for six different decorative versions, encloses events in the shape of well and lesser known iconographic symbols, or visual details to be spotted and deciphered:

the trumpeting characters of Leninian propaganda, the barbed wire of the lagers, the shots Lee Oswald fired at Kennedy, the Beatles’ trip to India, the binary code of computers, from Bauhaus to Dada anti-art, from silent films to the electronic sounds of Kraftwerk;
and much else in a scan spanning over twenty-year periods, a golden measurement for ages which were not always golden, especially in Italy, where the rise of Fascism corresponded to American Jazz Age.