Until the end of the 19th century, the Nordic region was a poor agricultural backwater. For most Scandinavians, money was short and eking out a living from the land was a struggle. As a result, homes and possessions were simple, spare and functional. This pared-down design ethos continued into the industrial era, which started later in Scandinavia than the rest of western Europe. Decorative objects were produced mainly for the small upper class, and were often based on patterns borrowed from France, Germany and Britain.
During the 1920s a new decorative style appeared in Sweden, an elegant combination of modern lines and simple yet traditional detailing that appealed to the developing middle class. The new style received international recognition and was labelled Swedish Grace. However, it was soon superseded by something altogether more radical. Also in the 1920s, young Scandinavian architects were amazed and excited by the modernist style emerging in Germany and France, which was replacing decorative detailing with designs based purely on function and modern technology. When the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund designed the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, he turned it into a manifesto for the new style. The exhibition sent a shockwave through the Nordic countries and established modernism (or functionalism as it was often referred to in northern Europe) as the order of the future.
From the 1930s onwards the Social Democrats dominated political life in Scandinavia and put into place a tax-funded welfare state program. Housing, schools, libraries and hospitals were built at a rapid rate, giving Scandinavian architects and designers new opportunities. The design and layout of new houses, in particular kitchens and bathrooms, were standardized to improve function and hygiene. The design of household items, such as ovens, tableware and door furniture, was reassessed to improve quality and performance. The 1930s also saw modern Scandinavian design making a breakthrough on the international stage.
The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto exhibited his furniture at Fortnum & Mason in London in 1933 and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1938. He also designed the Finnish pavilion at the New York World Fair of 1939. The Swedish designer Bruno Mathsson’s furniture was selected for the MoMA collection before the museum even opened. Meanwhile, the Danish company Louis Poulsen enjoyed tremendous success with Poul Henningsen’s PH lamps.
After the rationing of the Second World War years, there was an enormous demand for consumer goods in the Scandinavian home market. Production was fuelled by a desperate need for export revenue to kick-start the Nordic economies again, particularly in Finland, which had to pay off a large war debt to the Soviet Union. While Europe remained war-torn and economically crippled, the Americans adopted Scandinavian design as the style of preference for a new, modern age. The prestigious Georg Jensen shop on Fifth Avenue was a center for Scandinavian design in the United States. When the new United Nations headquarters was built in Manhattan, Scandinavian designers were responsible for much of the interior. Meanwhile, Scandinavian designers were also winning prestigious awards at exhibitions across the world.
During the late 1960s, a divide between industrial designers and designers as artists became apparent in Scandinavia. The focus on individual designers and their products was questioned by a new, more politically aware generation. What had happened to the idealistic notion of creating good design for everyone? Scandinavian industrial design remained successful, but decorative design began to fall into decline. Italy continued to turn out a large number of innovative and exciting products, beside which Scandinavian designs looked dated and predictable. Glassworks, ceramic factories and textile companies all faced dramatically falling sales, and many went out of business. For the manufacturers who remained, the only option was to follow foreign trends, often with depressing and unsuccessful results.
It was not until the late 1980s that a new generation of designers emerged in Sweden. Names such as Thomas Eriksson, Pia Wallén, Bjorn Dahlstrom and Thomas Sandell began to receive international attention, and leading Italian manufacturers such as Cappellini invited Swedish designers to work for them. The result was an explosion of creativity that has put Scandinavia firmly back on the design map. This rediscovery of a regional design identity is evident in all the Scandinavian countries and has certainly been assisted by the international revival of interest in mid-20th-century design classics, which to a large degree focuses on Scandinavian design.
Wood has always played a starring role in Scandinavian design. Each country has its own favorite: the Danes use beech and the Swedes pine, while the Finns prefer birch.
Historically, buildings, furniture, tools and household utensils in Scandinavia were to a large degree crafted from wood. While plastic, steel and concrete briefly stole the show during the 1970s and 1980s, wood has now resumed center stage in Scandinavian design and architecture, often in unusual or unexpected ways. The new Nordic Embassy complex in Berlin is a good example of the use of wood in contemporary architecture.
Before the advent of mobile phones, timber production was the dominant industry in Finland, and wood remains close to the heart of Finnish culture and the Finnish people. Wood has always been a major influence on Finnish design, architecture and interiors, and continues to be so today. A quarter of all Finns have summer houses, and few of these are without wooden saunas. The multi-talented Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala is perhaps best known for his work in glass, but he was a prolific designer in many other materials, including wood. His sculptural pieces created from layered laminated wood and his exquisite wooden tables and bowls were directly influenced by the densely forested Finnish landscape. Wirkkala’s work in glass, steel, ceramic and plastic was also influenced by nature and the elements and many of his designs were first made as prototypes in wood.
Wood has a unique density and functions well as an insulator against cold. During the Second World War, the Finns used spun wood fibers as a replacement for cotton. Products such as blinds, rugs and upholstery textiles can all be fashioned from spun wood fibers mixed with cotton. The Finnish designer Ritva Puotila has been a pioneer in this field. During the last 30 years, she has created both spectacular art pieces and more practical household products from humble wood fibers for her company, Woodnotes.
When Alvar Aalto first encountered the tubular-steel furniture of the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, his reaction was to adapt the Bauhaus design principles to a manufacturing process that better fitted both the Finnish tradition and his own idea of functional furniture. Aalto’s main challenge was to find a way of bending wood in the same way that the Bauhaus architects and designers bent steel. After much experimentation, Aalto developed a new technique using steam and heat to bend and mold wood – a technique that is still in use today. For Aalto, wood represented a more humane, sympathetic material for a better, more democratic world – it was a warm yet practical material suitable for use in hospitals, schools and nurseries. His choice of wood as a material can be seen as a political statement, not just a functional choice.
At the same time as Aalto was experimenting with bending and molding wood, the Swedish designer Bruno Mathsson was designing chairs using similar techniques but with a very different end result. Mathsson came from a long line of cabinetmakers and devoted his long career (from the 1930s to the 1980s) to designing chairs that aimed to maximize the sitter’s comfort. Mathsson was a bold innovator who devoted much time to the study of how people actually sat, years before the word ergonomic was in common usage. Mathsson’s furniture designs were a huge sales success and made him the most well-known and respected Swedish furniture designer of the 20th century.
When the world went wild about plastic in the 1950s, Scandinavian countries still continued to produce a huge number of wooden objects. Teak was the wood of choice, particularly in Denmark, for furniture and homewares, including items such as salad servers, ice buckets, trays, sculptures, toys and much more. The long tradition of the cabinetmaking remained strong in Denmark and these traditional skills were combined with contemporary styles, resulting in high-quality hand-made Danish wood furniture that was highly successful in the1950s. Designers such as Kaare Klint, Finn Juhl and Hans Wegner designed chairs that won awards around the world and made Danish furniture into a major industry.
The ingenious use of different woods and various skilled joining techniques used in the manufacturing process means that many Danish pieces from this era are works of art. Hans Wegner claimed that if a chair is still beautiful when turned upside down, then it is a good chair, and he applied this conviction to some 500 different designs. Many designs are still made today in small workshops across Denmark, some by the very same craftsmen who first made them half a century ago.
During the 1940s, the American aeronautical engineering industry developed a new method of bending and molding plywood. The technique was soon applied to furniture design by the innovative American designers Charles and Ray Eames. In 1952, the Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen developed a stackable chair made from a single piece of plywood on a tubular steel base that was suitable for mass production. Jacobsen’s biggest difficulty was eliminating the tension in the wood. As a result, he designed a chair with a very narrow waist, roughly resembling the shape of an ant.
Jacobsen approached the established Danish furniture manufacturer Fritz Hansen, with whom he had previously worked, but they were cautious about committing themselves to the production of this strange new design. To get the project off the ground, Jacobsen placed an order for 300 chairs for the architectural project he was currently working on, convincing Fritz Hansen that it was worth investing in the necessary equipment to produce the chair. In 1955 another Jacobsen plywood chair, the Series 7, was launched. With a broader back and four steel legs, it offered increased comfort and stability, and soon became a standard for all stackable plywood tubular-steel-legged chairs. Available today in beech, ash, cherry and walnut as well as dozens of lacquered colors, this chair remains the single most recognizable piece of modern Scandinavian furniture design.