Etsy keeps offering me more and more. When I think I’ve got it sussed, up crops something to grab my attention again and make me dig around again. Today’s crawl through uncovered a little gem… the Drumbo elephant money box designed by Luigi Colani* for Dresdner Bank in 1963.
*Update: I’ve since been informed that the plastic elephant may not be a Luigi Colani design. Fans of Colani’s work have looked through his catalogue and cannot find the elephant. Dresdner Bank became Commerzbank and wrote a blog post about this elephant. One comment asked if Colani designed it, and the (loose translation) reply was “We checked with our archivist. Even if many sources claim that Drumbo was designed by Luigi Colani, it is wrong. The creator of Drumbo is the designer Bernd Diefenbach. Unfortunately, we don’t know anything about him, otherwise we would have liked to tell you more about him.” Source: blog.commerzbank.de
This little plastic fantastic currency keeper was the earlier, more stylish version of the UK’s less elegant NatWest pigs, which enticed children to hand over their Deutsche Mark’s to Frankfurt’s Dresdner Bank. At a time when colourful plastics were beginning to enter the homes (with Verner Panton’s plastic chair launching just three years earlier), these little toys must’ve been extremely exciting for a child to get their hands on.
The Berlin-born designer Luigi Colani is renowned for his dynamic yet quirky organic furniture and industrial design. High profile commissions include Alfa-Romeo, Lancia, Volkswagen, BMW, Villeroy and Boch, Boeing, Rosenthal and NASA.
“Whenever we talk about ‘biodesign’ we should simply bear in mind just how amazingly superior a spider’s web is to any load-bearing structure man has made. From this insight, we should look to the superiority of nature for the solutions. If we want to tackle a new task in the studio, then it’s best to go outside first and look at what millenia-old answers there may already be to the problem.”
Luigi Colani, 2007
Such a shame that to get those ‘mark’s’ out of the elephant would mean smashing it open. If that isn’t animal cruelty then I don’t know what is. Do you love it as much as I do?
Designer: Bernd Diefenbach
Manufacturer: Dresdner Bank (now Commerzbank)
Year: 1963
Price: £27.07
Luigi Colani did NOT design these Dresdner Bank elephant money box
However he did design the CAPAROL elephant
http://www.colani.jp/TheColaniLine/yesorno/Dresdner/yesorno1.htm
Thanks for the tip-off. After reading your comment I went looking and it’s hard to find more on this. Do you have the original quote from Luigi Colani so I can update the post and include some quotes?