Arne Jacobsen, when Danish design met the world
For the Danish designer and architect Arne Jacobsen, even a pastry had to be nice, to also taste good.
"A pastry usually tastes better if it looks nice. A cream pastry, now that looks nice - in fact, there is nothing I mind as long as it looks nice."
Sometimes, Jacobsen said "I am choking on aesthetics" and took refuge in nature. He was a passionate botanist, as demonstrated by his his highly detailed watercolors. If his father, a wholesale trader in safety pins, had not convinced him to study architecture, Arne Jacobsen would probably have become a famous painter. His design skills enabled him to express his creativity in all-round projects. His production ranges from cutlery sets to monumental buildings.
The graphic skills helped him to give life to his innovative ideas, translating them into highly detailed drawings, while his sense of humor urged him to ask students and parents how things had "behaved" that day, as if even "things" they had their own life.
His projects derived from a simple, intimately Scandinavian concept: the need to simplify, going from the complex to the very simple. However, this didn't question the centrality of details. Jacobsen introduced functionalism in architecture and organic form in design. The first one thanks to his international mind, stimulated by his multiple intercontinental trips; the other, inspired by his love for nature.
He was born in 1902 in Copenhagen. In his twenties he went to sea as a sailor, on a ship bound to New York, then worked as an apprentice bricklayer in Germany and in 1925, when he was a student at the Art Academy of the Danish capital, he won a silver medal for a chair that was exhibited at the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs" in Paris. On that occasion he fell in love with Le Corbusier's design. He graduated in 1927 and, two years later, he opened his own design studio in Hellerup.
Inspired initially by Le Corbu and Charles Eames, with a truly international vision that renewed from within Danish design, without distorting it, Arne Jacobsen gave birth to a series of iconic creations that still inspire thousands of fans and students of architecture and design to go to Copenhagen, the city that collects them like gems in a jewel box.
Like the SAS Royal Hotel or Stelling House, a Modernist building in concrete and steel which shocked the Danes for its avant-garde appearance, seemingly out of place in that much more classical context.
Today it is a bar where customers can sit on one of the most famous chairs of history, by .
The antecedent of 7, always signed for Fritz Hansen three years before, is known as Ant (from the shape of its profile) and it is Denmark's first industrial chair. Jacobsen designed it for the canteen of a local pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisk, taking up the experiments carried on by the Eames with bent plywood. It is a light and essential chair supported by three tubular legs, once in plastic, today in steel. It soon became an international success, although it risked to never enter into production: Fritz Hansen did not immediately spot its potential, and Jacobsen had to promise to buy back all unsold chairs to convince them.
In 1957 two new successful items followed. First of all, the 3130 chair, renamed Grandprix after the award it won at the XI Triennale di Milano,
and secondly the AJ cutlery set designed for the restaurant of the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Produced by Georg Jensen, it was used by the astronauts in the famous movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick.
A year after, the Swan chair was designed. A technologically innovative chair: No straight lines - only curves.
The iconic Egg chair, just like the Swan chair, was designed for the SAS Royal Hotel, and is a real triumph of the "less is more" lesson applied to design:
In 1960, Jacobsen designed the AJ lamp, always for the same hotel. Produced by Louis Poulsen, it looked futuristic but is now a design classic:
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