VE505 table fan

To disperse air in a hot, stagnant room, a fan needs a set of elevated, whirling blades. In his elegant design for this table fan, Ezio Pirali shaped the blades like those of an airplane propeller and surrounded the fan with two intersecting rings, which suggest the path of planets around a sun, or perhaps the atom, whose electrons orbit its nucleus. While elegant, they would have done little to shield the blades from curious fingers.