Nanna Ditzel | Don S. Shoemaker Furniture Designs

The term “Scandinavian Design” (which includes Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) originated from the show “Design in Scandinavia” that toured the US and Canada from 1954 to 1957. Promoting the “Scandinavian way of living”, it exhibited various works by Nordic designers and established the meaning of the term that continues until today: beautiful and clean line designs, inspired by nature and the northern climate, accessible and available to all. Danish teak furniture, Swedish crystal and textiles, Norwegian enamel, Finnish furniture and glass merged into a concept generally perceived as Scandinavian. On the other hand, “Danish Design” is a term often used to describe a style of functionalistic design and architecture that was developed in mid-20th century. Influenced by the German Bauhaus school, many Danish designers used the new industrial technologies, combined with ideas of simplicity and functionalism to design furniture which have become iconic. A number of firms continue to be active in producing both classic Danish Modern designs and in introducing variants designed by a new generation of artists. I have put together a small zummary of the most prestigious Danish furniture makers and the designs they have been producing from famous contributors to “Danish Modern” like Finn Juhl, Kaare Klint, Mogens Koch, Børge Mogensen, Nanna Ditzel and Hans J. Wegner:

Rud Rasmussen, a family-owned and family-run furniture company founded in 1869 by Rudolph Rasmussen. Since then, the company has been handed down from generation to generation and today it is run by the 4th generation, by master cabinet maker and architect Jørgen Rud. Rasmussen. Their claim to fame is its close collaboration between architect and cabinet maker. In the late 1920´s contact was established to Kaare Klint and Mogens Koch whose designs Rud. Rasmussen has produced ever since. Rud Rasmussen´s list of recognized designers include: Kaare Klint, Mogens Koch, Hans J. Wegner, Børge Mogensen, Mogens Lassen, Poul Kjærholm, Finn Juhl, Ole Wanscher, Bernt, Larsen & Bender Madsen, Hans Bølling, Nanna Ditzel, Cecilie Manz, Jørgen Rud. Rasmussen and Vagn Jacobsen.

Specialized in seaweed mattresses in the early days, Getama was founded in 1899. Getama has manufactured furniture designs by Hans J. Wegner for almost 60 years and they still are the company´s best-seller. In 1994 Getama became part of Temco A/S, a Danish manufacturer of steel products; this cooperation resulted in a range of models that combine the elasticity of steel with lines of wood and upholstery. Hans J. Wegner, Nanna Ditzel, Bernt, 2R Rasmussen & Rolff, Niels Jørgen Haugesen, Jens Ole Christensen and O&M Design have collaborated with Getama.

Carl Hansen & Son opened his furniture workshop in Odense, Denmark in 1908. At the beginning, the company produced bespoke furniture – including everything from dining room sets to bedroom suites. As the company grew and times changed, it gradually began to produce smaller series of its most popular pieces. This combination of hand craftsmanship and rational series production soon became the firm’s hallmark – and continues to set it apart today. Until the mid- 1940’s, Carl Hansen & Son cooperated with Frits Henningsen, a Danish architect and cabinetmaker. It was Carl Hansen’s son Holger, who took a chance on the groundbreaking designs of the young Hans J. Wegner and the collaboration between Wegner and Carl Hansen & Son began in 1949. Wegner designed 4 chairs especially for Carl Hansen & Son that very same year (CH22, CH23, CH24 and CH25) – all of which came into production and were launched in 1950. Wegner’s first pieces for series production were anything but easy to make. With their distinctive, sculptural forms, CH24 (The Wishbone Chair) and CH25 (The Paddle Chair), were the most ambitious designs. The Wishbone Chair was particularly challenging. Its back rail was steam bent, its rear legs required turning by a sub-supplier and its construction demanded perfect craftsmanship. Holger Hansen, himself a master cabinetmaker as well as a businessman, worked closely with Wegner to adapt the company’s series production to the radically different designs. Today, Carl Hansen & Son continues to cooperate closely with the Hans J. Wegner Studio to introduce or re-issue outstanding designs from the treasure chest that Wegner left behind.

Fredericia Furniture’s history dates back to 1911, when the furniture company Fredericia Stolefabrik was founded. Closely connected to the name of Børge Mogensen, it produces the majority of this architect’s classic furniture designs. Their collection is based on furniture from Børge Mogensen, Nanna Ditzel and Hans J. Wegner, as well as new designers such as Alfredo Häberli, Shin Azumi, Thomas Pedersen, Hans Sandgren Jakobsen and many others. The Fredericia Furniture Collection ranges from classic designs rooted in the golden age of Danish furniture architecture to daring and innovative designs such as Cecilie Manz’s prized side table “Micado”:

PP Møbler is a family owned Danish joinery workshop established in 1953, with a strong tradition for crafting high quality design furniture. Throughout the years, PP Møbler has manufactured several unique pieces of furniture in cooperation with different designers. They are all characterized by exquisite craftsmanship and at the same time marked by the overall design vision. Types, styles, form, and material have never limited PP Møbler. The majority of the production consists of Hans J. Wegner’s furniture – mainly chairs – but several other designers have left their mark as well like Thomas Alken, Soren Ulrik Petersen, Zaha Hadid, Lise & Hans Isbrand, Jorgen Hoj, Cecilie Manz, Poul Kjaerholm, Ole Gjerlov Knudsen, Nanna Ditzel, Verner Panton, Gunnar Aagaard Andersen, Frederik Mattsons, Jeremy Walton, Lovorika Banovic and Komplot Design.

The Erik Jørgensen Møbelfabrik was founded in 1954by Erik Jørgensen. Erik combined his skills as a craftsman and good understanding of materials with new functionalist design trends and he lead the small company to success within a few years. He thought it was essential to have a constant interaction with the architects in order to create the right combination of design, function and quality. Several chairs and sofas produced by Erik Jørgensen have already become classics and their furniture is frequently used by actors, pop idols and heads of government. Jack Nicholson was one of the first stars to sit in a chair by Erik Jørgensen when he first leaned back in a “Corona Chair” in the film “Carnal Knowledge” (1971). The list goes on, and there are countless examples of music videos and fashion shoots in which the “Corona Chair” or the “Ox Chair” have been showcased. Erik Jørgensen´s leading designers: Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen, Louise Campbell, Poul M. Volther, Jensen/Ernst, Niels Gammelgaard, Hans J. Wegner, EJ DesignTeam, David Lewis, Erik Ole Jørgensen, Jørgen Gammelgaard, Tine Mouritsen & Mia Sinding, Hannes Wettstein, Tine Mouritsen. Also, Erik Jørgensen´s annual “EJ Design Award”, launched in 1995, ensures that a new generation of young designers is introduced into the trade when invited to present their daring ideas and visions.

Ivan Hansen & Hans Henrik Sørensen founded their furniture company Hansen & Sørensen in 1990. In 1998 Hansen & Sørensen (the present Onecollection), was contacted by Finn Juhl’s second wife Hanne Wilhelm Hansen, she requested the company to produce a Finn Juhl Model 57-Sofa for an exhibition. This led to the cooperation with Hanne regarding the re-launching of Finn Juhl’s* furniture. Today Onecollection has (as the only part in the world) the rights to produce and sell Finn Juhl’s designs, for the past 10 years the company has put 15 pieces of his many models in production. *Finn Juhl is regarded as the father of “Danish Design” and he introduced Danish Modern to America. With Finn Juhl as their flagship, Onecollection offers an interesting collection of furniture together with other Nordic designers like Nanna Ditzel, Erla Óskarsdóttir, Rud Thygesen & Johnny Sørensen, Søren Holst, Henrik Tengler, Niels Gammelgaard, Linn Bjørk, Tove & Edvard Kindt-Larsen among others.

Danish furniture manufacturer Johannes Hansen produced a number of furniture between the 1940’s – 1970’s. While there has been no production since then, several pieces have appeared in auctions during recent years; their beauty and rarity have kept prices high. An important part of Johannes Hansen’s success was based on the fruitful cooperation with Hans J. Wegner initiated in 1940. The first pieces of furniture designed by Wegner were displayed in Johannes Hansen’s store in Copenhagen in 1941. Even though Johannes Hansen was more than twice as old as Wegner, the unique collaboration between the two men became the undisputed backbone of Danish furniture design and the main reason for its recognition in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In 1944 Wegner designed for Johannes Hansen the first of a long series of ‘Chinese’ chairs, a series of chairs inspired by portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs. Another of his famous designs, the ”Peacock Chair”, was first introduced in 1947. The chair was manufactured for a very long time by Johannes Hansen, later picked up and resumed by PP Møbler in 1992, as Wegner had upgraded the basic design in the late 1980’s.

In the 1950’s, American manufacturers obtained licenses for the mass production of Danish designs – keeping high standards of craftsmanship at the beginning. Later the designs were altered to suit American tastes and American parts were introduced to reduce costs. When Sears and Woolworth’s entered the market, the Danes countered by producing new designs based on new materials. In the early 1960’s American manufacturers introduced molded plastic and wood-grained Formica as cheaper substitutes and the demand for Scandinavian Modern declined. Nevertheless, Scandinavian Modern is unlikely to ever go out of style. Today, the demand is worldwide from Australia to the US and the market is booming – from Jacobsen’s stylishly simple chairs to Wegner’s rounded, organic ones – displayed in top design showrooms and galleries across the globe as the ultimate image of modernity. An interesting clue: Hans J. Wegner (regarded as ”the master of the chair”, with more than 500 chair designs to his name) designed chairs for a long range of furniture manufacturers in Denmark: PP Møbler, Johannes Hansen, Carl Hansen & Son, Fritz Hansen, Getama, Fredericia Stolefabrik and many others. In his later years, Wegner entered the mass market through industrial furniture production. To this day, more than 25,000 of his best-selling “The Wishbone Chair or Y Chair” are sold each year. Mass-produced works of Hans J. Wegner, Finn Juhl and Arne Jacobsen are still in demand, but collectors are increasingly turning to limited production items from these and other great designers.

When buying classical Scandinavian Modern furniture pieces with investment in mind, I have to emphasize how essential it is to look for a design no longer in production (or re-issued); take as an example the Hans J. Wegner pieces produced by cabinet maker Johannes Hansen; one of his long version ‘Dolphin’ Chairs from 1950, recently sold for £75,650 at an auction.

…to be continued in part # 15

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Artek is a Finnish furniture company founded in 1935 by renowned architect Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino Aalto, visual arts promoter Maire Gullichsen and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl. The founders chose a non-Finnish name, the neologism Artek was meant to manifest the desire to combine art and technology. This echoed a main idea of the International Style movement, especially the Bauhaus, to emphasize the technical expertise in production and quality of materials, instead of historical-based, eclectic ornamentation. Aalto was innovative and radical and became known for his experimental approach to bending wood. His style became known as human modernism. On the other hand, Aino had a strong, independent input for Artek: she designed some of the classics that are still in production today and also held the role of Managing Director. The core of the Artek product range consists of Alvar Aalto’s furniture and lighting pieces. The company carries on the Aalto tradition and spirit by renewing and re-issuing the designs that outlasts its original owners. Artek’s original values – long-term durability and high quality combined with a clean form language – are still the company’s driving forces.

Since 1992 Artek is owned by the privately held investment company Proventus AB, based in Sweden. The creative hub of the company is Artek STUDIO, the unit where new products and ideas are developed, continuously searching for new materials and questioning existing solutions for sustainable design. Concrete examples are the “2nd Cycle” stools and chairs. The 2nd Cycle collection was introduced in 2007 during the Milan International Furniture Fair, as a statement of conscious consumption. A coded RFID tag embedded in the 2nd Cycle stool records the furniture’s history, stories, as well as information about its origins and authenticity. Few furniture items have achieved such a long and multi-phased life span: Artek’s furnishings have touched the lives of children, students, the elderly – all members of the family, together and separately. These 2nd Cycle items are part of Artek’s environmental strategy and are a proof of authenticity, longevity and the graceful aging process of an original Artek product.

In 2010 the company extended its portfolio with the acquisition of production rights to Ilmari Tapiovaara’s iconic furniture collection. Ilmari Tapiovaara was a great admirer of Alvar Aalto’s work, and he wanted to create products based on the same ideological premises; the integration of his collection into the Artek catalog is a major effort towards joining together renowned Finnish design classics under one umbrella. Artek´s collection range also has some remarkable Tapio Wirkkala, Ville Kokkonen, Ben af Schultén and Nanna Ditzel designs. Today Artek continues to work in close collaboration with prominent international architects, designers and artists, such as Eero Aarnio, Shigeru Ban, Naoto Fukasawa, Harri Koskinen, Juha Leiviskä, Enzo Mari and Tobias Rehberger.

Architect, critic, designer, entrepreneur, husband and friend but more than anything, somebody with a desire for expressing all these in wood, the main reason for what he pursued something that at that time was almost a dream: bending solid birch wood (the most abundant natural resource in Finland) in any angle desired. Extensive experimentation was performed; the successful result was the “bent knee” or “L-leg” with patents all over the world, becoming thus an inventor. This technique enabled him to express in wood the forms learned from Bauhaus like the cantilever which he used extensively in his designs and also was able to propose a wood solution to Breuer´s Model B3 chair and many other great designs. Concerned with “humanizing architecture” he rejected artificial materials such as steel tubing for his furniture. Wood was for him a “form-inspiring, profoundly human material”. The span of his career from the 1920´s to the 1970´s is reflected in the styles of his work, ranging from Nordic Classicism of his early work, to a purist International Style Modernism during the 1930´s, to a more organic and personal modernist style from the 1940´s onwards. What is typical for his entire career, however, is a concern for design as a “whole”; whereby he – together with his first wife Aino – would design not just the building, but give special treatments to the interior surfaces and design furniture, lamps, furnishings and glassware. Alvar Aalto’s organic formal language inspired many designers after him.