shell chairs in laminated wood by Arne Jacobsen

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Ant Chair 1952,  The Tongue 1955,  chair model 3105 for Munkegård Elementary School 1955

Series 7 1955,  Side Chair 3103 from 1955,  Grand Prix 1957 ... all in the permanent collection of Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen

 

 

Looking posts on this site from 2017 about Danish chairs from the 20th century a major and obvious omission from the list are the shell chairs in laminated wood that were designed by Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s.

It was an amazing and productive decade for the architect when he was working on major buildings but still designing housing. Work on Munkegård Elementary School in Copenhagen started in 1951 and was completed in 1956;  the Town Hall in Rødovre was completed in 1956 and the Town Hall in Glostrup was completed in 1959. Jacobsen designed major commercial and industrial buildings in this period - including an office building for A Jespersen & Son in the centre of Copenhagen - where work started in 1952 and finished in 1955 - the Christensen factory in Aalborg and pharmaceutical factories for Novo Industri A/S in Copenhagen and for a new site at Bagsværd to the north of the city centre and from 1955 through to 1960, Jacobsen was working on the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen.

He designed several major housing schemes in that same period with both the Alléhusene housing complex and the  Jespersen row houses built in the area close to the railway station at Jægersborg - a growing suburb in the north part of Copenhagen where Jacobsen had designed housing in the 1940s - and there was a second phase of building on the coast  at Klampenborg - with the Søholm houses built just south of the Bellevue theatre and the Bellavista apartments that Jacobsen had designed in the 1930s.

For prestigious public buildings Jacobsen designed specific, custom-made, furniture but he also worked on more commercial designs with a growing demand for modern, well-designed furniture for the home. Jacobsen designed a series of shell chairs in laminated wood in collaboration with Fritz Hansen - the well-established Danish furniture manufacturer - that could be used in commercial and public buildings but were also increasingly popular for use in ordinary homes.

These chairs included model FH3100 known as the Ant Chair that was designed in 1952; model FH3102 or The Tongue - a small chair for children designed originally for Munkegård School in Copenhagen but later made in a larger version; from 1955 model FH3105 - another chair produced for Munkegård - and from that same year model FH3103 with a more pronounced curve between the seat and the back with a broader and deeper and squarer upper part to provide better support for the lower back and the shoulder blades.

The Series 7 - model FH3107 - the most famous of these laminated chairs - also dates from 1955 and is still the best-selling chair produced by Fritz Hansen.

Then, last in this series of shell chairs, the Grand Prix - model FH4130 - designed in 1957 and made in several versions.

The form of these chairs - with a moulded shell in laminated wood - divides them - visually and, in terms of construction and manufacture, into two distinct parts with a seat and back to the chair in one material - the shell in laminated and moulded wood - and a base or support that was made separately in another material.

This clear division of the production process could be exploited because it allowed the manufacturer to make different versions of a chair by providing options for distinctly different bases that changed not just the character of the chair but often also the way that the chair was used and where it was used …

  • most of the chairs could be purchased with thin metal legs that were bent under the shell and held in place on a fixing plate. These legs were compact and light in weight so the chairs could be used in a house or in a small apartment as a dining chair or a general chair
  • for several of the designs, there was an option for a support of legs in bentwood if a customer preffered a chair that looked more traditional
  • nearly all the chairs could be stacked and, although they were light, they were surprisingly robust, and came to be used in offices and canteens and meeting rooms
  • for several of the shaped and moulded chairs, there were options for a single vertical metal column that could be fixed in tiered rows for seating in a lecture theatre
  • most of the chairs had an option for a cross-shaped metal base, usually light-weight aluminium, that could be fitted with a swivel mechanism and/or castors for use at a desk so they could be used as an office chair
  • and - most unlikely of all - the simple and compact shell of the Tongue chair, designed initially as a chair for a child, was upholstered in leather and set on a high fixed metal column with a swivel mechanism for a bar stool at the SAS Royal Hotel.

These chairs are deceptively simple but, in production, the moulding process presented challenges.

The chairs that were designed by Alvar Alto and manufactured in Finland from the 1930s were the first Nordic designs to exploit the properties of laminated and moulded wood in the commercial production of furniture. The layers of wood veneer were curved into different forms under pressure so the shape was 'remembered' when the wood was taken from the press but although those chairs by Alto had the seat and back from a single piece of laminated wood, the curve was in one plane so that it formed, in effect, a scroll.

Trying to mould the laminated wood into more complex curves, either hollow or convex and in both directions across the shell, Fritz Hansen put the material under considerably more stress.

The challenges might seem to be relatively simple …

  • to use the thinnest possible gauge of plywood to stop the piece from looking crude or being heavy
  • to source high quality, unblemished and even or consistent veneer … plywood for construction can have patches or uneven colour but for these chairs the shell was just sanded and finished to maintain the natural qualities of the timber so a good or an interesting grain pattern can also be important
  • to bend as sharp a curve as possible between the seat and the back without the facing layers of the finished shell delaminating - so folding on the inner face of a curve or splitting on the outer face
  • to create complex curves that were hollow or concave front to back - so it was not like sitting on a plank - but also curved across the width, so from side to side which, in effect, anticipates the curve under the weight of a person sitting down - to avoid that feeling of it sinking in like sitting down on, or rather, in a canvas chair
  • to create those complex curves without cutting into and overlapping sections of the shell
  • to develop ways of fixing the thin shell to any form of leg or support … you cannot fix a leg unit with screws through the leg and straight into the shell from below, because the shell is too thin, but if you fix screws or bolts from above, driven down into the leg or base, then those are exposed and you would be sitting on the screw or bolt heads

On that last point, the first version of the Grand Prix had four L-shaped and moulded leg pieces stuck to the underside of the shell with a glue developed for that purpose but, I presume, under stress, the glue delaminated the facing layer of the shell so in later versions the design was changed to a cross-shaped and self-supporting framework of legs that was fixed to a plywood plate at the centre of the underside of the seat in a similar way to the fixing of the metal legs.

For comfort, there must have been extensive trials to adjust the flexibility of the shell and the strength, weight and flexibility of the legs or base - particular where the chair has legs in thin bent tube metal. Too flexible and the chair would feel unstable but too rigid and it would be like plonking down on a park bench. The chairs also use rubber spacers or buffers set further out from the centre fixing plate to hold the legs free of the shell; provide some control to the flexibility of the shell and also stop the legs torqueing or twisting or shifting round.

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The view of the underside of a Series 7 Chair shows just how complex and how subtle the design of the shaping of the metal legs is with the cross pieces of the legs under the seat protruding beyond the edge of the seat - so that the chairs could be stacked - and with the metal curved downwards towards the centre to follow the shape of the moulded seat rather than sitting against it. The legs are also angled outwards - rather than being set vertical - which in part makes the chair appear lighter and more elegant - strictly vertical legs can look basic or stolid - but also provides extra stability for a light chair.

There is an interesting but more general point about the shell chairs designed by Jacobsen and made by Fritz Hansen. We are now so familiar with major Scandinavian design companies like Muuto or Normann producing chairs with a range of bases and a range of colours and covers along with options for plain shells or upholstered versions, that we no longer see that as unusual - or, actually, we take that for granted because we expect a number of options when choosing a design. Before these chairs were produced by Fritz Hansen in the 1950s, chairs were designed as a complete or self-contained entity with production in relatively small numbers but, if there were options or variations, it might be that a different material could be used for the frame - so asking for a chair to be made in mahogany rather than oak for instance - or would be limited to selecting leather rather than textile for an upholstered chair.

At most, the scale of a chair might be adapted for a later version so Rud Rasmussen produced the Red Chair designed by Kaare Klint in a smaller size as a dining chair where the original, was wider with more generous proportions, designed for the meeting room at the Design Museum. Chairs like the Thonet Chair from Austria, produced through the second half of the 19th century, was made in large numbers and was made to be transported in parts and assembled on delivery but that was unusual and there were different models or different styles but no options within each type of chair. Several of the chairs designed  at the Bauhaus were conceived as relatively cheap furniture of a high quality of design for a large market but politics and events overtook their wider marketing and if there were options it was usually with the same frame but with a choice between a chair with arms and one without. Alvar Alto, through the company Artek, certainly understood the commercial potential of marketing and international sales but it was the American company Herman Miller, marketing the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, and Fritz Hansen marketing the designs of Arne Jacobsen who really established the potential for large-scale production of well-designed furniture in the years through the late 1940s and the 1950s.

Republic of Fritz Hansen

note:

Shell chairs for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen - including the Egg and the Swan - were designed in this same period - in the mid 1950s - but were made in foam and upholstered so presented different problems and resulted in a very different aesthetic so they will be the subject of a separate set of posts.

design classic: Series 7 Chair by Arne Jacobsen

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The Series 7 Chair, was designed by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen and was first shown at an international exhibition in Helsingborg in 1955. It has a moulded plywood shell, in a single piece for seat and back, that is supported on a tubular steel base with four thin legs that are slightly splayed outwards and meet at the centre under the seat.

Not only is the Series 7 still in production, over 60 years later, and still the best-selling chair from Fritz Hansen, but it is said to be the most copied chair in the world. Does that make it the first truly universal chair … even the first egalitarian chair? In part that depends on its original and its current price and, I suppose, the number of countries where it is sold because, strictly, to be universal, it has to be available to a very broad demographic. 

Certainly it is a very interesting chair because it has had such a long period of popularity. In part this is because it was not only very much a product of its period but was also incredibly advanced … so, it must have felt very ‘modern’ to buy one in 1955. But actually you could suggest that the design is so simple … so stripped back to basics … that it is as far as is possible timeless. But can it be of it’s period and timeless?That raises the question about why some designs, over time, drift out of favour … become boring or old fashioned or politically inappropriate … a Corbusier chaise covered in zebra skin for instance … and others become icons.

Initially it was not so different that it meant that the customer was taking a risk but the design was also advanced enough that, to some extent, at least some might have seen its potential to remain popular although I’m not sure that even Jacobsen himself would have anticipated that the Series 7 would still be in production into the second and presumably the third decade of a new century. 

That in itself is interesting because in 1955 Jacobsen was a young architect trying to establish his career that was then associated primarily with designing houses but his reputation is now secure as one of the great architects and great designers of his generation. So, in that sense, the Series 7 could be claimed to be iconic and part of that odd current fascination with famous names. Is the chair ‘great design’ because it is by Arne Jacobsen or is Arne Jacobsen a great designer because he designed the Series 7 Chair?

 

The Series 7 Chair was a product of its period because immediately after the war both high-quality raw materials, including timber for furniture, and men with traditional skills, including cabinet makers and upholsterers, were in short supply. A light plywood shell uses much less timber than a traditional chair with a frame in wood and the manufacture of plywood can make use of smaller and younger trees. With a light metal frame, all the parts for the chair could be made in a factory and then assembled … rather than the whole piece having to be made in a workshop by a cabinetmaker, a skilled artisan, shaping and finishing timber parts and cutting carpentry joints. 

For the Series 7 the light construction was also appealing as its style was a clear contrast to the heavy wooden furniture of the pre-war period and it resonated with a growing and wide-spread desire to be International - and so ‘contemporary’ and not obviously of a specific country or recognisable style.

Carsten Thau and Kjeld Vindum, in their book on Jacobsen, suggest that the architect himself preferred a version of the chair with arms and the company also produced Chair 7 with a swivel base. All these versions were used in Rødovre City Hall, just to the west of Copenhagen, that had been designed by Jacobsen and also completed in 1955 so from the start the chair was sold for both commercial and domestic use and the design was even scaled down as a version for children. 

Those first chairs were available in oak, teak, palisander and black or could be upholstered with fabric or leather.

In 1968 Jacobsen himself selected new colours to extend the range with the moulded shell then available in grey, red, curry, green, blue, dark green and white. 

Fritz Hansen later introduced further new colours, notably a new range of nine colours chosen by the artist TAL R to mark the anniversary of the Series 7 in 2015, but there have been versions recently in pink and in very dark blue, for the shell and the legs, as well as versions with legs with a different metal finish to the standard chrome including one option now with a brushed or pewter look.

To mark the 60th anniversary, seven architects, designers or design studios were asked to reinterpret the design and it was interesting to see how designers, many with well-established reputations in their own right, approached the challenge … Zaha Hadid replaced the four legs with three tight loops of metal; Neri & Hua produced a love seat; Jean Nouvel Design a striking black and white love seat, with two chairs linked together but facing in opposite directions; Bjarke Ingels a shell on top of a stack of seats, like strudel pastry or a certain make of potato crisps, and from Snøhetta there was a shell without legs but set in a miniature Nordic landscape.

There are many reasons for the continuing success of the design. Clearly the design is flexible with almost any permutation of colour possible and several different forms of upholstery but perhaps the most obvious reason is its aesthetic appeal … the shell is a beautiful shape with a simple sensuous outline that Jacobsen described as organic. 

But that shape was not just about aesthetics - it was also very practical. Shaping the piece to cut into a narrow centre or waist meant that the seat and back could be curved in two directions … early plywood chairs were curved only in one plane to form what was in effect a scroll for the seat and back. 

To be able to curve the shell in two planes makes the chair much more comfortable so the shape of the back supports the full width across the shoulder blades and the curve in the vertical plane, between back and seat, provides good support if you push your bottom back into the seat and sit upright.

 
 

early version of the chair in Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen with metal cover over the leg housing - the central disc of plywood to reinforce the seat and take the leg fittings is just visible

 

a modern version of the chair upholstered in leather with a plastic cover to the leg housing

The seat is curved gently down across the width but there is also a tighter curve downwards of the front edge which means the seat does not stick in the back of the legs but it also gives the front profile a visual weight that makes it look more robust or stronger than if you saw a sharp thin front edge that was just the thickness of the plywood and that curve also hides the housing for the leg unit.

That point where the four legs meet is important for the strength of the chair and for the way it has some give or flexibility as you sit down. It is a matter of balance … too rigid and the seat would feel like sitting on a plank and too flexible and the chair would rock or give in a disconcerting way.

Series 7 is remarkably light but remarkably strong and with that it’s very practical because the arrangement of the legs and the fact that they are slightly splayed means that the chairs can be quickly and easily stacked and stacked high in relatively large numbers so they are good for temporary seating in lecture theatres.

Towards the outer edges of the seat are blocks that hold the legs in place but these also act as spacers when the chairs are stacked so the seats are held level and do not scratch or mark the seat of the chair below.

There is a circular plate of plywood underneath the seat that reinforces the seat and gives it slightly more rigidity but also gives greater thickness for fitting the leg unit without carrying that thickness further across the seat. In contrast, plastic shells can have gradual or even sudden modifications of thickness for strength or extra rigidity or for sockets for legs or arms or whatever but an essential and inevitable feature of plywood is that it is a constant thickness … for the Series 7 the plywood is 9mm thick.

Plastic rather than plywood for the shell would have been possible in 1955 - the famous chair with a plastic shell by Charles and Ray Eames was designed in 1948 and in production by 1950 - but would have been more expensive to produce as it required an investment in expensive and highly specialised machines and although chairs in moulded plastic are now common and popular, in the 1950s and through into the 60s and even later they were considered by many to look slightly cheap and be inappropriate in a home although perfectly acceptable and with clear advantages for a school or a canteen. 

With their very thin almost spidery legs the Series 7 probably looks better as one of a group - so around a dining room table - rather than standingalone but also looks good in rows.

Perhaps this is the key to it’s success. The design is flexible and works well in a variety of settings and for a wide range of uses … the standard plywood shell can be used with a wide variety of bases, including a swivel unit, so it can be used in an office and the shell can be fixed to a horizontal rail or bar in a lecture theatre with fixed seating or even fixed directly to a step in raked seating. The elegant shape of the back means that they get away from the solid, block-like appearance of most cinema and theatre seating.

 

 

Why has the Series 7 Chair had such a wide and long-lasting success?

In part it has benefitted from good marketing. Each succeeding generation at Fritz Hansen seems to be given the task of re packaging the chair. The design is simple, so in some ways it can become what the buyer wants, helped by considerable flexibility in the number of permutations so wth a good coat of paint in a strong colour it looks great in a school but with an expensive veneer, matt metal legs and squab cushions in the best leather it can be used with an expensive table in the most sophisticated dining room in an expensive home.

But there are other less tangible, less easy to define qualities. Jacobsen was an architect rather than coming through the traditions of cabinetmaking and furniture design, so what was important to him was how the chairs looked in the space of a room. 

The design is novel but not extreme; still distinct and immediately recognised but that does not seem to have restricted its appeal and its not a heavy and aggressive and masculine look but not overtly feminine either. Does that make it a compromise … be it an incredibly elegant and much admired and very popular and commercially successful compromise but never-the-less a compromise? 

lecture theatre, Museet for Søfart, Helsingør / The Danish Maritime Museum in Elsinore