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If your kitchen cabinets are filled with stackable dinnerware and cups, you have Lella and Massimo Vignelli, along with plastics manufacturer, Alan Heller, to thank. In 1964, Vignelli designed a bright, colorful, and perfectly stackable melamine tableware set. As writer Alissa Walker says in a 2021 article in New York Magazine’s Curbed: “Vignelli’s pieces embodied both precision and playfulness, and they did indeed tolerate total abuse, but they also excelled at a task most housewares companies hadn’t nailed: stackability.” This same set would later be produced by Heller in the United States.
Photo by Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
Heller discovered the original designs in 1966—which were initially only available in white and yellow—when they were on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, where they sat as part of the permanent design collection. This original set was named “Max I” and had been manufactured by Aricoli Plastici Electrici (Arpe) in Milan in 1964 after the stackable tableware won the Compasso d’Oro Award for Good Design. When the Italian company went out of business soon after, Heller flew to Italy to rescue the original molds that sat abandoned in storage. He then reintroduced the Max series to the United States—with a new range of bright rainbow hues—and it soon became known as “Hellerware.”
