Danish design in context … architecture, design, style and travel in the Nordic countries
At the end of November Heidi Zilmer demonstrated her work and exhibited her wallpaper at Museumsbygningen, the gallery in Kastelsvej in Copenhagen, at the now well-established and regular show for artist-craftsmen and photographers, organised by Banja Rathnov under the title The Time is Now.
Heidi will have a stand at the major design fair northmodern that opens this Wednesday, the 13th January, at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen and runs for three days.
Not that long ago, if someone said that they were a designer, you could take a quick look at the way they were dressed and have a fairly good idea if they were a furniture designer, an interior designer, a product/industrial designer or a graphic designer. Ok sometimes the stereotyping wasn’t reliable but usually pretty accurate.
And, more important, it was relatively easy to understand what they did and how.
Since Christmas I’ve read an article about “designing a personality” for an AI project and the Fast Company on-line design journal had an article about the 18 most important design jobs of the future which included among others Real-time 3-D Designer, Augmented Reality Designer and Human Organ Designer.
Perhaps designer, as a job description, is no more tightly defined than talking about someone being a musician when that covers anything from a busker, to a sessions musician, to an international performer and through to a composer who plays all their work through a computer.
But actually that doesn’t stop me feeling that the words design and designer are now over used and their definitions stretched.
However, the most depressing newsletter to arrive in the New Year was from the Design Council in the UK offering papers on “insights on how design drives innovation and growth” and about manufacturing “businesses wanting to adopt design principles.” It was the hint of surprise in the first and the implication that it was something that might or might not be achieved in the future in the second that worried me. Surely this is not about design and designers but about failure in strategic management and the problem that senior directors at companies somehow do not appreciate the importance of good design at all levels of their business.
But then why don’t they understand that? The British were at the forefront of industrialisation … in both manufacturing and for marketing. In the 18th century Josiah Wedgwood knew all about technical innovation, quality control in production and about advertising, sales and efficient distribution: he used direct mailing, travelling salesmen, free delivery and illustrated catalogues and much more but at the core of his business was good design.
And of course he was not the first - simply one of the first to work on a truly industrial scale for mass production and become wealthy in the process. French silver workers and silk weavers who moved to England during religious wars of the 1680s understood completely the value of their designs and the importance of quality control although they tended to work for even more exclusive customers than Wedgwood but before them were potters bringing new designs and new techniques from Italy or Spain or the Netherlands to produce everyday wares and earlier still of course the glass workers of Venice established an International trade that depended on integrating technical knowledge and design skills.
Design is a process and not an ingredient. It’s not something that can simply be added to make an item more valuable or that can be left out to make something cheaper … although having said that good design is certainly something that can be compromised to keep unit costs down and profits high. Why do we seem to reduce design and the design process to surface and to appearance? That’s like judging an actor by their make up.
Design is the process of looking at what is needed, thinking about how something is used and how it works, deciding which materials to use and determining how to make something using those materials before launching into production. It is the designer who does that.
Cecilie Manz graduated from the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997 and, after a period of study at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, she returned to Copenhagen where she has established her own studio.
Designing furniture, lighting and household products, she has worked with many of the major Nordic design companies and manufacturers including B&O, Fredericia, Fritz Hansen, Holmegaard, Kähler Keramik and Muuto.
The Aitio shelving range was designed for the Finnish company Iittalia and has been in production since 2014.
There are three designs in metal - a square box, a double-width box and a shallow wide shelf - all with the same form with a base plate with the edges turned up and, wrapped around that, shaped metal forming, in a single piece, the back and sides folded round to the front to almost meet at the centre. The proportions; the silhouette of the stepped down sides and the quarter-round profile of the folded corners and the cut-out of the base piece are all very carefully thought through. In less-skilled hands the end result could have been clumsy or crude but actually the designs have real finesse and illustrate very clearly the difference between a design that is basic or functional and a design that is carefully refined … minimalism is not a starting point for a design but an end point, so as here, might perhaps be better described as reductionism with the designer seeing how much to take away, how much to simplify and knowing exactly when to stop.
A robust metal bar is fixed to the wall and has notched lugs over which the shelf drops … the shelf having simple holes drilled in the back … and two dimples, towards the bottom edge of the back, keep the unit vertical over the back plate.
These boxes can also be used on a work top or on a desk without being suspended from the wall.
There are three colours - a white that is not brilliant white but almost stone or cement, a gun-metal grey and a mustard - and all in a matt finish.
There is a fourth option with a wooden shelf that is supported on metal end brackets that echo the form and the profile of the other shelves.
Careful attention has been given by Iittala to the design of the packaging - both for the way the cardboard box protects the item during shipping and storage while in stock but also for distinct graphics and typography.
Perhaps the designer most strongly associated with bent wood for furniture is the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. Many of his designs dating from the 1930s are still produced by Artek.
Here, a juxtaposition of chairs on display at Designmuseum Danmark shows how a designer can return to a shape or, in this example, rework a design in different materials that have different qualities and dictate very different manufacturing techniques.
Shown together are a bentwood chair from the early 20th century - an arm chair from the Austrian company Thonet from 1904 - alongside two chairs from the third quarter of the century by the Danish designer Poul Kjærholm.
Kjærholm's version of a bentwood chair PK15 is in beech and dates from 1978/1979, just before the designers death, and the steel and leather chair PK 12 was actually designed by him in 1964.
Both the classic Thonet chair and the version by Kjærholm use screws and bolts to fix the separate parts together and both use a bentwood hoop below the circular seat to give the legs strength and the chair some rigidity … in bentwood it’s not possible to use stretchers between the legs that are fixed in place with mortice and tenon joints as in a traditional chair frame.
The Austrian chair revels in the sharp curves that could be made with steamed and bent beech but Kjærholm refines and simplifies the curves to produce a design that is much more restrained although both chairs have long, high curved side arms - on the earlier Austrian chair swept back under and fixed to the side of the seat but on the Danish chair integral with the front legs.
Both chairs have woven seats.
Again to strengthen the frame, the earlier chair takes the sweep of the back and the hoop of the back legs together. Kjærholm separates the two curves but has a small and simple spacer at the centre.
Initially, the steel chair appears to have the same shapes and curves as the later chair in beech but of course the metal dictates very different details in the construction. The strength of the metal tubing means that the hoop below the seat can be omitted completely as can the spacer at the back and the two curved sections of the inner loop of back legs and outer arch, with the front legs and the arms in a single piece, are attached to the rim of the seat by short stubs of metal with the parts welded together. The seat is not circular but rather like a distorted ellipse and the seat is a leather pad dropped into the seat rim rather than being woven.
A version of the PK 12 that was made by E Kold Christensen has the upper sweep of the back bound in leather, the strips plaited around the steel, and matching the leather of the seat.
Poul Kjærholm designed some of the most beautiful and most striking of chairs of the modern period of Danish design.
At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a cabinet maker in his home town of Hjørring in Jutland but moved to Copenhagen in 1948 where he continued his training at the Kunsthåndværkerskolen - the School of Arts and Crafts - then based at the Kunstindustrimuseet - now Designmuseum Danmark. It was Hans Wegner who introduced him to the industrial design of Germany and to Ejvind Kold Christensen, then establishing a company that manufactured pieces by both Wegner and then Kjærholm. The younger designer moved across almost completely to using industrial materials rather than wood although he used natural materials, particularly leather, with amazing almost stark effects which emphasises the clean precise lines of the furniture that bring his designs closer to engineering and certainly a long way from the forms and techniques of cabinet making.
The PK25 was made from a sheet of steel that was cut and then shaped in a hydraulic press, and given a matt chrome finish and with a single length of sailing rope wrapped around for the seat and back.
Back in the Summer there was the annual diploma show at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, KADK, in Copenhagen with work from architectural students, fashion designers, jewellers, ceramicists and of course young furniture designers. It was an extensive and impressive exhibition and good to see just how much new talent is coming up through the education and training system in Denmark.
Designs for two chairs by Rasmus Warberg, shown at the exhibition, link back to the recent posts here about the chairs designed by Finn Juhl and by Hans Wegner. Warberg’s chair came in two versions - one with leather upholstery and the other with webbing covering the seat. What was more striking was that the design also came with alternative top pieces for the back rest and these were in darker woods to contrast with the uprights of the legs and back. As with The Chair by Wegner, the uprights of the back are not housed into a flat underside of the back bar but the curve of the back is taken down into stubs (an ugly word for a very attractive feature) to form a smooth transition between back and upright.
Note also the high-quality work on the leather upholstery where it fits snugly around the back upright and also around the top of the front legs that stand slightly proud of the top of the seat. It is good to see that craftsmanship of a high quality can still form a key starting point for contemporary Danish furniture design.
In 1944, Finn Juhl was in his early 30s when he designed the NV 44 Chair. NV are the initials of the cabinetmaker Niels Vodder. Juhl first collaborated with Vodder in 1937 and they worked together on many designs through until 1959.
From 1930 to 1934 Juhl had trained as an architect under Kay Fisker at the Royal Danish Academy and then worked in the architectural firm of Vilhelm Lauritzen for ten years although increasingly he focused on interior design and on designing furniture.
This chair came at a turning point in his career and in 1945 he left Lauritzen to set up an independent design company and his reputation now is based on his furniture designs rather than his work as an architect.
The NV 44 chair is quite a virtuoso piece with shapes and lines curving and flowing through different planes. An English form of chair called a balloon back has a similar line for the back with the back legs flowing up in a single curve into the rounded arch of the top of the back rest but here the arm rests also flow round and through the same shape so it looks almost as if it should be made in a mould rather than constructed from separate pieces of shaped wood.
There are interesting technical details like the side braces that, rather than running between the back and the front legs, are set at a sharp angle to run up from the back legs to the centre of the front frame of the seat forming a V shape. This means that in silhouette the space between the legs looks uncluttered.
On balance, the design seems more dated, more fixed in the 1940s, than Wegner’s comparable chair, The Round Chair, from 1949. Perhaps it is the deep leather-covered seat although that too is given a rounded shape … earlier leather chairs would normally have had flat front and side rails with the leather fixed by a line of nails along the bottom edge … as with the Red Chair and the arm chair from Rud Rasmussen both designed by Kaare Klint in the late 1920s.
This comparison with the work by Klint shows just how much the form of armed chairs in Danish design changed over less than 20 years from something solid and robust, still linked to cabinetmaker’s work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to a style that was fluid and sculptural.
In 2012, to mark the anniversary of the birth of Finn Juhl, a limited edition of the chair was produced by OneCollection
Hans Wegner showed this chair first at the Annual Exhibition of the Cabinetmakers’ Guild in 1949.
Made in oak by the cabinetmaker Johannes Hansen, it was identified in subsequent catalogues as Chair JH501 but it was Wegner himself who described it as the “round one” and in Denmark it is known generally as The Round Chair. Exported to America, it is now known there simply as The Chair. It is still in production but is now made by PP Møbler and in their catalogues is chair PP501.
The chair shown in the cabinetmakers’ exhibition had a woven cane seat and cane was wound around the back rest to cover where the wood of the arms was joined to the piece of wood that formed the back. It was not until 1950 that an alternative version was produced, with leather upholstery rather than cane for the seat, and the form of the back and the joins that were used were altered so that the chair could have a plain wood back and arm rests without cane work. That version appeared in catalogues as the JH503 from Johannes Hansen and is identified now as the PP503 by PP Møbler.
Both the PP501 and the PP503 are available now in cherry, walnut or ash, as well as in oak - like the first version - and the finish - which makes a considerable difference to the character as well as literally to the feel of the chair - can be lacquer or an oil finish and the ash and oak can also be finished with a soap treatment. In part, it is these options for different timbers and different finishes that help make this chair so enduring and still so popular. *
There is something of the chameleon about the design so, in a dark wood, that has a high polish and with a leather seat, it has more than enough style and sophistication for either a boardroom or for a more formal dining room but in pale oak, with a matt finish and a cane seat, it looks decades younger and fits happily with a contemporary arrangement for a family room alongside furniture of very different design or period.
The Round Chair was one of the first pieces of furniture that was designed after the second world war for commercial production. Clearly, it was not a cheap factory product but certainly marked a new direction away from the skilled but small workforce found in a cabinetmakers’ workshops and who were producing all high-quality furniture before the war.
In February 1950, the influential American magazine Interiors published an article that showcased work by Finn Juhl, Borge Morgensen and Wegner but it was The Round Chair that was featured on the cover. The Round Chair was selected for the Good Design Exhibition - organised by the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with The Chicago Merchandise Mart - that ran from November 1952 through to February 1953. That was the second year of the exhibition when the display was arranged or designed by Finn Juhl. ** The price tag on the chair appears to have been $125. ***
The Round Chair featured again in an exhibition in New York in the Georg Jensen store on Fifth Avenue in 1959 that focused on the work of Wegner and although it was the Round Chair that was on the cover of the catalogue it was, curiously, the cane version and with cane around the back so the original JH501.
So, The Round Chair was one of the first important and one of the first commercially successful pieces to be produced in what is now referred to as the classic period for modern Danish furniture but when asked about The Chair, Wegner commented that, personally, he thought that it was his best achievement … “not because of its export success, but because I have been more thorough with it than anything else.”
Many people have written about just how modest, genuinely modest, Hans Wegner was so this statement is revealing. If he says he was thorough then it was almost-certainly a lot of hard work combined with experience and presumably a fair bit of determination. Understanding that is crucial to seeing why the design of this chair is so important. The proportions and the gentle curves of the chair look simple but simple does not mean easy and certainly does not mean basic. So part of being “thorough” was getting those lines and those dimensions and those relationships of the main parts of the chair right. Not perfect - to create an ideal - but right for this particular chair. That is, in part, about compromise … not compromise in the modern sense of doing what you can get away with but compromise in the sense of balancing what is gained or what is lost as elements of the design are changed. Here there are several broader points of compromise or balance or trading off that makes the chair such an important example of how the design process should work. So each part is reduced down … to put it crudely a straight leg with a square cross section could do the same job of supporting the seat and the arm of the chair … but take too much away and the leg looses its strength and the places where joints have to be cut to house the seat frame into the leg are weakened. The choice of wood for this specific design is an important consideration from the start … so the same design could not be made from birch. It is not hyperbole to say that the design reflects what Wegner knew about what good Danish craftsmen could do with good Danish oak … though again most Danes would be too modest to state that in that way. So from the start, the design built on well-established and well understood expertise. The quality is another and a very deliberate compromise although it might seem odd to describe it as a compromise in quality with a chair like this but in fact it was a very successful compromise. Cut quality and it is less likely to survive in commercial use but focus on it having to be a robust chair for the board-room or restaurant and it becomes too expensive and possibly too heavy and solid for domestic use in the home. It would be interesting to see if figures are available to show how many of these chairs are in restaurants and how many are in homes. Finally there was a careful balance between what could and should be done to use factory methods in the production … to simplify the design and to use machines to increase the numbers that could be made. This chair was aimed at large scale production for export or at least the production of more chairs than could be made in a small workshop … but from the start it seems to have been an important but difficult part of the design brief - to again use anachronistic and modern marketing jargon - to produce a chair in relatively large numbers but to produce a chair that showcased Danish craftsmanship and quality.
The vertical elements of the chair are all elegantly tapered and with the smooth and subtle curves of the back rest and the strong but thin profile of the arms this is one of Wegner’s most beautiful if not the most beautiful of his designs.
Elements are shaped and cut back but not so much that it weakens the structure. Nor are the shapes imposed on the wood … the shaping of the arms and the rounding of the end of the arms, where they over sail the front legs, all exploit the way that the grain in a good piece of timber means that it can be cut and shaped and sanded smooth. One detail that shows well the techniques and skills of the cabinet makers is the shaping of the underside of each arm piece at both ends to form integral housings for the top of the leg. The on-line site for PP Møbler has photographs of a craftsman cutting or finishing that shape with what is called in England a spoke shave … a special plane for rounding and tapering a spindle with a cutting blade in the centre and handles on each side so the cabinet maker uses it with both hands.
For stability, all four legs of The Round Chair are set to be angled inwards diagonally at the top, or perhaps it is better to describe them as splayed outwards to the foot. This means that the joints between the legs and the seat frame have to be cut sharply and accurately, particularly the shoulders of the tenons, but these angles reduce the chance of tipping the chair backwards, as someone sits down, or sliding sidewards as someone stands up if their weight is not evenly distributed. It is also important visually so, even when no one is sitting in it, the chair appears to stand firmly and confidently on the ground.
To understand what this means, look at the Faaborg Chair designed by Kaare Klint in 1914. That chair has front legs that are cut square and tapered but vertical and the back legs are flared or curved out at the bottom to provide that stability but it makes the balance of weight for the chair appear rather precarious ... almost too delicate for the oddly solid and rather heavy back despite it being in cane.
The low and quite wide silhouette of The Round Chair, when seen from the front, links it with Wegner’s design for the slightly earlier Windsor Chair from 1947 although in that chair the arm pieces are designed with a very different form being ramped up to just below the top rail that is housed between the back leg pieces, just below the top, and the back legs are not straight but given a slight change of angle at the point where there are the joins for the side frame and back frame of the seat. So, Wegner, through a series of designs for different chairs, was experimenting … trying to produce a simple but strong and stable design but one that combines straight legs with curved and rounded shapes that trim back the main vertical elements of the chair to the thinnest and most elegant profile possible without compromising the strength of the chair particularly at that crucial point where the legs are joined to the frame of the seat. Ultimately, what confirms that the design is both strong and stable, despite it’s relatively light weight, is that Wegner could avoid having stretchers of any form below the seat.
For The Round Chair, the complex shape and flowing form of the back and arm rest has been described by some as a propeller shape, because it reminds them of the complex curves for the blades on the first wood propellers on very early aeroplanes. The back and arms of The Round Chair although it reads as a single if complex shape is constructed with three separate pieces of curved and shaped wood that are then joined together … if it was cut from a single piece, it would not only waste timber but would snap or split where it curved round against the grain.
Early versions of the chair had cane wrapped around the centre part of the back rest, in part, to link visually with the seat but also to disguise this fact that the back and arms were not a single piece of wood but a composite. The second version of the design is strong but, more important, more honest as the joins are made into a feature of the design. In several chairs Wegner made this strengthening of the joins even more obvious by inserting dramatic angled tails or combs in a contrasting wood to make them a strong visual feature.
However, it is the first version of The Round Chair with a cane seat that shows off so clearly the skills of the cabinet makers … upholstery can be used to cover all sorts of tricks in the design of the frame to make it stronger or cheaper or easier to make but with a cane seat, there is really nowhere to hide anything. In a good, high-quality chair, the joints and the finish have to be perfect because everything can be seen. Although, of course, having said that, the upholstery on the 503 hides nothing for the leather seat is dropped into the frame as a pad rather than resorting to the common practice of taking leather or fabric right over the frame and fixing it with nails to completely cover the substructure of the seat.
There are several different ways to hold in place the canes of a woven seat. In the cheapest form of chair, panels of pre-woven cane are fixed across the seat frame and held down in a channel with a thin rod of cane but it can be difficult to stretch the cane work tight across the seat. In some chairs a series of vertical holes are drilled down through the front, the back and the side pieces of the seat and the canes are taken up through one hole, stretched across the seat to the opposite side and taken down a hole and then up through the adjoining hole and then back across the seat either straight across or commonly across a diagonal which then produces the popular honeycomb pattern. In other chairs, the cane can be taken over the outside of the frame and doubled back underneath - copying the usual method with rush seats - but that can make the cane work look rather solid or baulky.
For The Round Chair, the method used to fix in place the cane seat is rather more complicated. The cane is taken over the edge of the seat frame but then doubled back through long slots through the vertical face of the frame. These slots cannot be cut the full length of each piece of the seat frame because that would undermine the strength of the frame and make it difficult to cut and would weaken the joints where the frame is housed into the legs so these slots stop short at each end.
Because of these foreshortened slots the densely woven area of the cane seat is consequently set in from the frame but this becomes a strong feature of the design with adjoining canes crossed over in pairs to form a line of elongated Xs as an open border to the more-densely woven area you sit on. It becomes a positive element of the weaving pattern and, as with the earlier Faaborg Chair by Kaare Klint, it gives the seat a lighter look and a more distinct relationship with the floor which can be seen through the cane work.
There is a downward curving cross brace, running front to back under the seat of the cane version, that is important as it strengthen the frame but few people will even notice it - in part because the outer ends are also wound in cane so it is less obvious when seen from above through the cane work of the seat.
Wegner clearly saw the checkerboard pattern of the cane work on The Round Chair as both an integral and an essential part of the design.
So The Round Chair looks good; was in the vanguard of the rapidly developing style of modern Danish furniture in the early 50s; marked a change to producing not just cheaper furniture but more expensive pieces commercially rather than in a cabinet makers’ workshop and it helped establish an international market for Danish design but is it comfortable? In the end, ergonomics should be the test for any chair.
For a start, there is a marked drop or curving down of the centre of front rail and this gives the seat a slight hollow shape that takes a backside more comfortably.
Looking down on The Round Chair from above, you can see that the broad curve of the back forms a wide and generous seat - The Round Chair is 630mm wide overall so not the widest of dining chairs but the Wishbone Chair, designed in 1950, is just 550mmm wide. In some ways again, The Round Chair is reminiscent of the Faaborg chair although where that chair, designed by Kaare Klint in 1914, is different is that it has a level and continuous, horizontal line to the top of the back and arms, when seen from the front, which encloses the person sitting in it … it seems to force your arms up higher to a more stilted angle to the body or you can just rest your elbows on the sides but then your hands should be set demurely together in your lap. That is perhaps the key to the comfort of The Round Chair, so, to put that the other way round, the shape of The Round Chair, with arm rests lower than the top line of the back, allows the person sitting in the chair to rest and support their arms on the side pieces of the chair, in a lower and more natural position.
The back rest itself is deep, set as a strong vertical but is gently curved in plan to provide a broad band of lumber support but the arm pieces, as they curve round from the back, twist to the horizontal with a slight swelling out, close to the back, to support the elbows, but then the arm pieces taper in and continue to a slight and chamfered or undercut lip beyond the front legs. That projection or over sailing helps to make the join, between the arm and the top of the front leg, stronger but also the fingers of the person sitting in the chair, drop naturally and comfortably over the end of the arm and that feels like a natural and relaxed way to sit …. with the arms along the top of the side pieces and then when getting up out of the chair it is easy to use your arms to steady yourself and then give a slight pressure downwards as you stand up. So …. easy to sit down in the chair, wide enough to fidget around if you are uncomfortable or bored and about as easy as possible to get out of.
Wegner presented three chairs at the Cabinetmakers’ Exhibition in 1949 and they could not have been more different. Along with The Round Chair, he showed the Folding Chair JH512, designed to hang on a wall in a small apartment, and the dramatic tripartite Shell Chair, which has an amazing combination of bold cut-outs in thick plywood and a complicated bentwood frame. These were all virtuoso pieces and presumably for Wegner, then in in has mid 30s, they marked his coming of age as a furniture designer.
This photograph of The Chair was taken at the Wegner exhibition just one good chair at Designmuseum Danmark in 2014. It shows that Wegner, from this point on, returns to themes or ideas or techniques … not to copy or repeat a design but he back tracks to an interesting point where he could explore a different sequence of choices through the design process to take a design to a very different end. The Cow Horn Chair JH505 dates from 1952 and has shortened arm rests so that when not in use the chair can be pushed closer to the table. Office Chair JH502, with its dramatic deep back rest and a metal frame, was designed in 1955 and shows a development of the back of the Round Chair that provides more support for the spine and over a slightly wider range of positions as someone may have to use an office chair for much of the day whereas sitting on a dining chair is normally for a much shorter period. Wegner became interested in ergonomics and in the early 50s worked with Professor Egill Snorrason who had undertaken research on posture, particularly for patients who had polio.
When people talk about The Round Chair, many comment on just how comfortable it is which is said to be the reason why John F Kennedy requested Wegner’s chair when he appeared with Richard Nixon in a television interview in September 1960 - the first ever Presidential campaign debate - and an appearance for the chair that gave it considerable status.
John F Kennedy had aggravated a pre-existing back problem while on active service in the American Navy during the war although that was not widely publicised as it might well have been seen as a sign of weakness that could have been exploited by political opponents particularly as he was dependent on a number of strong pain-killing drugs. Kennedy was one of the first politicians who understood the importance of image so if he realised that if he moved around in his chair during the broadcast, simply because he was in pain and uncomfortable, it might be interpreted as being nervous or even evasive as he answered questions.
A Round Chair with cane seat was added to the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1953 (MoMA Catalogue 486.1953) and was the first of seven different chairs designed by Wegner that have been acquired by the museum.
* In 2015, the shipment of fake Wegner chairs made in China and destroyed by officials when they arrived in Norway were copies of The Round Chair.
** The first Good Design exhibition from November 1950 through to February 1951 was designed by Charles and Ray Eames.
*** A check-list in the MoMA archive of pieces in the exhibition includes just one chair by Wegner described as “Chair, Oak, Cane Hans Wegner” that must be The Round Chair and the retail price is calculated as about $125. One web site that calculates inflation suggests that $125 in 1951 would have been equivalent to about $1,280 or 9,000 Kroner or just over £1,000 now in 2017.
This post was edited and expanded and new photographs added in February 2017
Back in October several on-line design sites posted about Norwegian officials ordering the destruction of 100 copies of the famous Wegner Round Chair … a batch of fakes that had been ordered for a restaurant or hotel in Norway and made in China.
I’ve been sitting on this post for some time … appropriate I suppose because it’s about chairs … but the issue and, particularly comments on the original articles, raised several really important points that I had to mull over to write about after some careful consideration.
Of course, the first point is that copying a design without permission and without paying for a licence or copyright fee is at at the very least cheap skate, probably dishonest and in many countries actually a crime.
Some people could not understand how buying the chairs had broken the law but in Norway, as in Denmark, buying items that contravene copyright ownership is illegal for commercial companies so it is not just a manufacturer who could be breaking the law by copying a design although the law does still allow individuals to go abroad and buy fakes for their own use from countries like the UK where copyright laws seem to protect the manufacturer’s right to make a profit over the designer’s right to protect their work.
There used to be a phrase about passing off - implying deception - although I’m not sure anyone uses it now but one curious aspect about buying copies is the implied deception by a purchaser. I can see that someone obsessed by design might want to own at least a version of furniture they admire but furnishing a commercial space with copies of prestigious and expensive furniture is different. If there is not a big notice on the door saying “these are fakes but hoping you are still impressed” then presumably buyers are hoping that customers think that they have spent more on the refurbishment than they actually have. The Round Chair is very comfortable but was that the reason for buying the fakes? Other good chairs by other good designers are available … as the BBC might say.
Buying copies is a missed opportunity. Sort of playing it safe. Buying what someone thinks someone else will be impressed by. Why not commission a design from a young designer or a new furniture company and actually make a big thing of that? A hundred chairs in a new restaurant could launch a career or a company.
Of more concern were the comments posted by readers. Some were in support of copyright protection but they were in the minority. Many of the comments showed a real misunderstanding of the design process and actually revealed a major gap in understanding between the designers and their customers … the people who at the end of the process buy the furniture or lighting or ceramics or glassware.
Some comments implied that really they thought that the design process must be quick, easy and over rated so designers are overpaid for what is, surely, not much more than a quick sketch or at most a nice drawing for the manufacturer.
Of course the reality is so different. An initial idea might come as a flash of inspiration but realising that involves a huge amount of time to refine ideas, trying and rejecting some versions, and dealing with the whole process of moving from a model or a concept version to something that can actually be reproduced in a factory. And that’s without factoring into the ‘cost’ of the design the training and years of hard-gained experience that came before the design and surely has to be rewarded somehow.
For the Form range, designed by Simon Legald and launched by Normann last year, there was a three-year development programme that meant a considerable investment in terms of time, effort and money during a period before there was any income. That money, rightly of course, has to be recouped from subsequent sales and has to be an element of the purchase price. That is lost or at best compromised if another manufacturer steals your design and then produces a cheap version that undercuts what you have to charge to recover the investment in the development of the design.
The Form range of chairs and tables is also a very good example of the technical aspects of design that all the comments to the story about the fakes ignored. When Form was launched, Normann had a display in their shop in Copenhagen that showed just how much care had been taken with the moulding process to get the rigidity of the plastic right for comfort, how much care went into the way the legs are joined to the shell to achieve both the look but also the strength they wanted, and so on.
There are two points about that: the company making a copy is avoiding all that angst and cost but, perhaps even more important, most customers, clearly, don’t understand that the structure and the use of appropriate materials at the core of a piece is as important or more important than it’s appearance. Somehow, we have have got to a stage where people generally associate ‘design’ exclusively with appearance. It hints at a shallow understanding of the design process.
This goes only some way to explain the price difference between a genuine piece and the copy. One observation in the comments was that “Fakes wouldn’t exist if design wasn’t so expensive. Everyone should have access to good design.”
This seems to suggest that ‘design’ is seen as an ingredient rather than a process and wilfully fails to understand the basic economics. The implication in the comments was that the value/price put on the design side of production was substantial and if cut would reduce the ticket price … almost as if there were no costs between the design and the item appearing in the shop. The cost of materials, the wages to the people making the furniture, the cost of the factory premises in terms of rent or investment in buildings, investment and depreciation of machinery, the cost of power and water, the profit element for the manufacturer after the cost of administration and the tax levied on the profit, the shipping costs, the expenses of the retailer, their premises and staff, and the profit added by the retailer as well as their tax on profit and, in Denmark, 25% VAT and finally the transport cost of delivery to the customer are, almost certainly, all and every one more than any copyright fee earned by the designer. The sad reality is that if you doubled the designers fee it would make little difference to that final ticket price.
Major companies who own the rights to a design might, if they have a good and popular design, see a good return on what they paid the designer but in fact that regular revenue stream is usually what finances the next design or the promising design that for some reason does not simply walk out of the showroom. So add to that long list of costs the cost of advertising and the time spent talking to bloggers and magazine journalists and the investment in trade fairs just to make sure people know they have an amazing design someone might want to buy.
If your design is stolen and reproduced badly then it certainly undermines a designer’s and a manufacturer’s reputation.
Some argue that many fakes are indistinguishable from the original but then of course another economic reality kicks in. Legal controls on materials, sustainability, wages and so on means that there are few areas of the manufacturing process where cost can be reduced so, generally, quality suffers and what starts then is a race to the bottom.
Conversely, if every purchase is of a genuine piece then volume sales might mean that the unit cost comes down. By buying a fake people almost guarantee that the price of the original can only come down if quality comes down as well.
People buying fakes are not striking a blow for the democratic right to buy good design but undermining the industry and that means more and more production, even by major companies, is outsourced to countries where labour is cheaper. In the short term, consumers might not see that as a problem. They have the chair they want, or at least a chair that looks like the chair they want, so where is the problem? Long term, with outsourcing goes the reason for retaining skill and knowledge and infrastructure locally. What goes is the ability to produce in Europe and with it the close and crucial link between the designer and the manufacturer. There are accounts of Wegner calling in to the cabinet maker’s workshop on his way home to see how work was progressing and to discuss the feasibility of an element of a new design. I’d say that that close working relationship and mutual respect was crucial for both the designer and the craftsman and that is reflected in the quality of the product.
Several curious comments about the business of copying designs were along the lines that surely a chair is just a chair and all designs derive, in one way or another, from what has been produced before. Wegner himself was inspired by the designs of other countries and other periods and he returned to earlier forms and earlier shapes he himself had designed but he did not repeat a design but explored different solutions.
Although the chair is a basic piece of furniture there are almost limitless possibilities, particularly in using new materials. At the Autumn exhibition by cabinetmakers at Øregaard there were 18 very different chair designs and what was interesting to see there was that although those designs were clearly in that tradition of masters making perfect and expensive one-off pieces to show off their skills, most could, with few changes, go into commercial production. There was absolutely no indication that they were hard-pressed to come up with new ideas.
Nor is there a problem with manufacturers continuing to produce historic designs legally … that does not in itself mean they are living on past glory, as some comments suggested, or that it will stymy the work of new designers but generally it sets a standard and means that great designs continue to be available. The Wegner Round Chair is still made by PP Møbler in the right way, by skilled local craftsmen, and using the right materials. There is no sell-by date for good music or good books but new books and new music come out all the time … good design is no different.
You can probably guess that I had no truck with comments along the line of a chair is just a chair so what is all the fuss about?
Several comments about the destruction of the Wegner chairs asked rhetorical questions about what the designers, who are no longer alive, would feel about the cost of their furniture now because they wanted good design to be available to everyone. This is wilfully conflating several ideas. Hans Wegner, more than any other designer of his period, understood and appreciated the skill and therefore the value of the contribution made by the craftsman. He also understood completely the importance of using the best or the most appropriate materials and his designs were based always on the structural integrity of the piece. He understood, more than anyone, that a design like the Round Chair used expensive materials and levels of craft expertise which meant that it could never be a cheap chair. Don’t just look at the price of one of these chairs in the 1950s and conclude that was cheap. Compare that price with the average wage … in 1952 the average annual income in England was £589. Working families might only bring in seven or eight pounds a week. How many Wegner chairs could that buy?
That is why several of the Danish designers, including Hans Wegner, worked with the co-operative movement in Denmark to produce well-made and well designed furniture at a realistic price. The reality is that the Round Chair was always an expensive design.
Several comments about the fakes also suggested that designers from the Bauhaus in Germany wanted to produce cheap good designs for ordinary people. Again that is a distortion and an ironic misunderstanding of design history. Designers from the Bauhaus and before them, for different reasons, the artists and architects of the Arts and Crafts group in England, were appalled by the poor quality of mass-produced, factory-made goods for ordinary people - mainly because they simply reproduced badly, in cheap materials, what wealthy middle-class families owned. The designers of the Arts and Crafts movement were concerned that craft skills were being lost, particularly rural skills like chair making, as people moved from villages into towns to work in factories. Their answer was, in part, to return to simple, honest and well-made designs. Hand made and, inevitably expensive. The designers of the Bauhaus and architects at the start of the modern movement also wanted straightforward and honest designs but designs that made full use of industrial methods, new materials and exploited industrial scale of manufacture to keep prices down. If they were alive now they would hardly be advocating that every person had the right to buy a cheap Eames recliner.
There are alternatives to the Stool 60 but few are actually that much cheaper.
One option is to buy second hand … so at the moment Abel Sloane of 1934, the English dealer in mid-century furniture, has three stools for £200 that were customised by a previous owner in that distinctly 60s colour of what I think was called Burnt Orange. Or in flea markets in Denmark you can find the metal and wood version designed by Arne Jacobsen called the Dot Stool.
Hans Wegner had a go at designing a comparable stool but for me this is one of his few oddly awkward and unsuccessful designs … far from the stark and completely rational form of the Stool 60 … but I’m not sure how many were made or how often it appears in auctions.
There are modern versions of the stool. Normann make the Tapp Stool for 1,299 Kroner - about £126 - and the interesting stool from Hay, with angled metal legs and a cork seat, is 999 Kroner or just under £100.
An initial report by Jenny Nordberg, begun in 2013 and completed through 2014, looked at how small-scale production of furniture, ‘gadgets’ and other design objects could be part of a sustainable community within Skåne, a clearly defined and relatively small region. The report considered ethical values in consumption and looked generally at production and at manufacturing skills surviving in southern Sweden. In part it seems to have followed a growing desire that more food should be produced locally.
One aim of the consequent project is to reduce transport costs for both materials and for finished goods but also it was hoped that focusing design and production locally would also mean that there would be fewer intermediaries in the commercial chain.
Early in 2015 twenty-four designers were selected along with twenty-four manufacturers to collaborate in the project. They were chosen in part for their curiosity about the project but also for their openness to trying new business partnerships.
Many of the designers had worked both locally and internationally and the manufacturers ranged in scale from craftsmen, who are generally geared up to small production runs, to companies organised for larger-scale production. Each partnership was given freedom to determine what they would produce and how and much came down to developing personal as well as working relationships.
This project has also been about testing the form of collaboration, between designer and manufacturer, and aimed to establish a more equitable financial arrangement that moved away from the normal pattern of royalties for rights to reproduce a design to agreements where the designers and manufacturers share the expenses incurred in development and initial production but then also share the revenue.
Items or objects produced through the project cover a wide range of materials and manufacturing techniques including blown glass, ceramics, metal work, leather work and textiles and a wide range of items from stacking boxes to storage jars to lighting to jewellery and a champagne table.
That last item emphasises one curious aspect of the works presented. It would appear from the introduction to the exhibition that the designers and manufacturers were given freedom to choose what they would produce. Jenny Nordberg, who also curated the exhibition, commented on this:
“As a curator, I imagined that most people would design and produce saleable inexpensive items to show that it actually does not need to be particularly expensive by local production. There, I thought wrong. It has instead been mostly projects where both designers and manufacturers wanted to challenge themselves and show the breadth of their skills. Many of the projects … are unique, conceptual, luxurious, on the verge of unfeasible and overall, just amazing.”
Biophillia - Stoft & Zol Art
Unisex-kimono-kofta - Liv Andersson & Biommiga Gredelina
Vaporware Fluid
Andréson & Leibel och Humi-Glas (samt JFKemi)
Spegelrör
Petra Lilja & Wallåkra Stenkårlsfabrik
Transformer
Milan Kosovic & Thomas Alexandrsson
Stilleben
Sophia Lithell & Herman Andersson Plåt
1L=
Patrik Bengtsson & Genarps Lådfabrik
It is not clear if this shows that designers or manufacturers were concerned primarily to showcase their skills but that seems unlikely given the well-established careers and reputations of most. Possibly they wanted to use the opportunity to produce things they would not normally be able to work on. It could be more of a problem, in terms of ongoing viability and the possibility of extending the project, if they all felt that reasonable financial returns would only be possible through producing more expensive items or if they thought that their potential market would not be interested in buying just basic items. Perhaps it is simply that, at this initial stage in this project, more basic designs - so everyday household items such as tableware - actually need a much larger production run to return a profit.
All the designs are available through the web site.
The exhibition continues at Form Design Center in Malmö until the 15th November and then transfers first to the National Museum in Stockholm and then in 2016 to Vandalorum in Värnamo.
Den Nya Kartan - The New Map
The Cabinetmakers' Autumn Exhibition has just opened at Øregaard Museum in Hellerup. This year the theme for the exhibition is 'Petite' - as in refined and elegant - and works had to be free standing and were restricted in size to less than 60 x 60 cm.
The exhibition will also been shown at Maison du Danemark, Avenue Champs-Élysées in Paris from 27 January to 3 April 2016.
The exhibition continues until 18 October 2015
Ten designers, architects and craftsmen have come together to exhibit their work in a private apartment in Lavendelstræde - a street in a tightly built up area of historic buildings just to the east of the city hall in the centre of Copenhagen.
It is an amazing apartment spread over two upper floors and the attic space of the tall, narrow 18th-century house with a striking mixture of original parts, including the roof structure, but with modern features such as an open metal staircase, a long wall of modern kitchen units and an area of glass floor between the attic bedroom and the kitchen and dining room on the level below.
The kitchen area opens onto a large roof terrace with views over the Copenhagen skyline looking towards the tower of Vor Frue Kirke.
This is not just a chance to see a very striking apartment but, of course, to see the works displayed in a home, in the rooms of the apartment, along with books and furniture and kitchenware of a very real domestic setting.
Perhaps we have created false divisions between craftwork, such as tableware, that we can use in our homes, and the works of artists working in the crafts that we see as gallery pieces. These works, in this exhibition, were not, specifically, designed and made to be contained in an art gallery or museum - although many of these artists have their works in museum collections - but they can and should be seen and appreciated in a home. These pieces stimulate comment, attract admiration, stimulate discussion, stir people to decide if they love, like or even dislike the pieces. Owning and enjoying original art and craft pieces is not exclusively the prerogative of the public gallery or the private wealthy collector but original works of art or of craftsmanship really do have a place enhancing our lives in our homes.
Works shown here range from ceramic multiples through printed cotton squares displayed on a clothes drier on the roof terrace, to a bench in smoked oak supported on upturned stoneware vessels and there are monumental architectural urns in stoneware. Porcelain lights over the main table are a homage to the iconic Danish PH lights and striking jewellery in braided or plaited white plastic beads, forming deep ruffs for the wrist or ankle but set in a framework of a house, reflect the title of the exhibition. The one odd work, and only odd because it was large and set diagonally it fills and dominates the space of the bathroom it is displayed in, is a long narrow glass case with an arrangement of single socks with no pair.
This piece, Finds by Morten Sørensen, illustrates really well one very important role of art which is to point out or isolate something that either we have not thought about or points out an absurdity or a universal experience that we rarely even think about. Other works show how artists experiment with materials and forms pushing boundaries that really should not be there and multiple works are a really good way of emphasising subtle differences or step changes or variations.
Architects, designers and artists taking part include:
Anne Fabricius Møller, Anne Tophøj, Anne Dorthe Vester, Maria Bruun, Johan Carlsson,
Katrine Borup, Kristine Tillge Lund, Marianne Nielsen, Martin Sørensen, Theis Lorentzen
Hjemlighed ... an exhibition at Lavendelstræde 8, 1462 København K continues until 15th September.
northmodern provides an opportunity to see, together in one place, the huge range of furniture, lighting, tableware, kitchenware and so on that is currently produced in Denmark … the works of individual designers, the products of Danish workshops and manufacturers and the current catalogues of major design stores.
Some new young designers, like Overgaard and Dyrman and Makers With Agendas, have been discussed in other posts, so those reviews are not repeated here and obviously some major companies were not showing at northmodern this year, so, this is a personal selection of outstanding Danish design from established designers or well established companies that was shown at northmodern in August 2015 and exemplify why the Danish design industry is so strong.
Caroline and Mikkel Palsby have established their company to produce and market designs by their father but have also launched appropriate new ranges, focusing on tableware and kitchen knives, including the cutlery range ICHI.
In the early summer they opened a new studio and shop on the outer side of the lakes in Copenhagen, in Ravnsborg Tværgade, and there will be a longer profile of their studio and work on this site next month.
This is the very best of design where quality and attention to every detail is paramount and these standards are being taken forward to build on an important part of Denmark’s design heritage.
The furniture company Hansen & Sorensen was established by Ivan Hansen and Henrik Sørensen in 1990. They changed the name of the company to OneCollection in 2007.
They both came from a background in making and selling furniture and it is interesting to read the introduction to their company on their web site where Henrik Sørensen explains that the ”cornerstone” of their company is “our fervent passion for furniture and design - this is why we are often called furniture nerds.”
This explains, in part, their focus on Danish design history. Early pieces produced for the company were designed by Søren Holst and Henrik Tengler but in 1998 they were approached by the widow of Finn Juhl to make one of the Juhl sofas - the Model 57 - and this led them to explore and study Juhl’s archive of designs. They relaunched the Poeten sofa and then the Pelican Chair that originally had only been released in a very small run. OneCollection now holds the rights to all designs by Finn Juhl.
At northmodern they showed the special anniversary edition of the Pelican Chair and on their main stand the Nyhavn Dining Table designed by Juhl about 1950, with his award-winning Reading Chair from 1953 and a 53 Sofa.
A curious characteristic of this furniture is that if you know it only from photographs, then the impression is that it is quite large - the Pelican Chair looks almost monumental whereas in fact it is relatively compact - and by setting the furniture within a room-sized space at northmodern, defined and contained by bookcases on what would have been open sides of the stand, it showed how well the furniture would work, even in a relatively small apartment.
Glove Cabinet by Finn Juhl designed for his wife in 1961 and shown at the Cabinet Maker's Guild exhibition the same year
The family-owned joinery workshop was established in 1953 and has focused on craftsmanship and developed and deliberately sustained their understanding and real appreciation of the qualities and characteristics of the timber they use to make their furniture.
They continue to produce classic designs by Hans Wegner … pieces that are so well known that, exhibited at northmodern, they needed no labels. Upholstery and some colours or the choice of specific woods have been updated if appropriate but the construction and, more important, the quality of workmanship maintains the standards set for the original pieces.
PP Møbler do produce works by contemporary designers with furniture by Thomas Alken, Søren Ulrik Petersen and Jørgen Hoj and again it is the quality of construction, the quality of the timber used and the standard of the craftsmanship and finish that are paramount.
Bar Bench, PP589, Hans Wegner 1953
In the main central gallery at northmodern there was a stark and revealing exhibition, also by PP Møbler, with a line of their framed chairs designed by Wegner that visitors to the fair could try but with, in addition, a cut-through section of the back rest with a profile of the human spine to show exactly why these chairs provide support and are so comfortable.
Wegner’s criteria, when judging any chair, was that not only should it look good when viewed from any angle but that it had to be comfortable - not just in the five minutes after someone sat down but as they twisted and moved around as they ate sitting at a dining table or as they sat over a long period as they worked at a desk.
The very best designs combine aesthetic appeal with quality of production and, ultimately, with practical utility: it is not enough that a piece of furniture or an item of tableware should look good but it should be well made, the design and the method of manufacture should, at the very least, be appropriate to the material but should, if possible, exploit and enhance the natural qualities of the material and the piece should do what it was designed to do and do that well. Simple to say ... not so easy to realise.
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