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Since Jacobsen died in 1971, well before the world of architecture
and design was transformed by such revolutionary developments as
Memphis and the post modern movement, it may seem surprising that
so much of his furniture remains in production today. It includes
the stackable Ant chair with its moulded, plywood seat-and-back
and tubular steel legs, and its successor, the Series 7 group of
chairs. It is a plagiarised version of the latter which was used
to conceal part of a young woman's naked torso in what must be one
of the most famous photographs of a chair ever taken - that by Lewis
Morley of Christine Keeler, a call girl whose liaison with the British
Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and the Russian Assistant
Naval Attache, Eugene Ivanov, led to a major scandal in the early
1960s. As Emily King pointed out in the catalogue to the Oxford
exhibition, 'the chair in the Morley photograph stands in for modernity's
steady erosion of privacy and class-derived privilege. Keeler would
not have exposed nearly so much were she sitting backward on a piece
of late 19th century baroque revival'.
Introduced in 1952 and 1955 respectively, the Ant and the Series
7 have been in continuous production ever since and have become
as widely copied as Hille's polypropylene chair of 1964. Their design
(drawn on a small piece of paper followed by models and then prototypes)
demonstrated Jacobsen's ability to work closely with the manufacturer
in a way that was not dissimilar to that practised by Italian industrial
designers of the same period and their success has enabled relatively
small Danish companies to export throughout the world. These chairs
were followed by (among others) the Swan and Egg chairs of 1958,
and the Oxford chair of 1965. At the same time, Jacobsen was also
designing his AJ cutlery, which Stanley Kubrick used in his film,
2001: A Space Odyssey of 1968. Jacobsen's Cylinda Line stainless
steel hollowware for Stelton followed in 1967.
What distinguishes so much of Jacobsen's furniture and product
design is the mixture of innovative ideas with technical expertise.
The three-legged Ant, for example, long predates the three-legged
chairs designed by Philippe Starck. Both the Ant and the Series
7 are minimal in their use of materials, elegant in their shape
(the Series 7 more so than the Ant), and easy and comfortable to
use. The Egg chair, on the other hand, is a design icon. Is its
appeal because it is womb-like as well as protective? And is the
appeal of other chairs by Jacobsen because (as the critic Peter
Dormer said) they cross the divide between the crafts and industrial
design, are middle class and democratic? They may also appeal because
many young people in Europe today are having to live in small spaces
as did those who bought the chairs in the 1950s and because there
is now a reaction against the overblown decoration of the 1980s.
Or it may just be that these designs by Jacobsen are timeless.
There is, in fact, a simplicity of overall concept, allied to immaculate
craftsmanship and the occasional elaboration of structural details,
that runs through much of Danish furniture design. Thus, in addition
to Jacobsen's minimalist designs, Hans Wegner produced his wooden
and cane-upholstered chair of 1949, so simple and elegant that it
was simply called The Chair, while Borge Mogensen's Spanish chair
of 1958 is equally simple in its wooden construction, if a little
playful in the way in which its separate leather seat and back are
threaded through the structural members. Clarity of concept also
marked Poul Kjaerholm's designs such as his Hammock chair of 1965
which, in its use of metal, also aligns him to the Bauhaus and Le
Corbusier. And even Werner Panton, who worked in Jacobsen's office
in the early 1950s, kept to very simple and easily readable construction
when designing chairs with wire frames, or in plexiglass and plastics.
Indeed, the concept of design prevalent in Jacobsen's work goes
back to furniture designed by Mogens Koch, Kaare Klint and Finn
Juhl in the 1930s and 1940s, and forward to the Campus chair designed
by Peter Hiort-Lorenzen in 1990. More recent designs include the
Kildevaeld 2000 chair and Flying Float chair (1999), designed by
Philip Bro Ludvigsen and Thomas Krause, and Troels Grum-Schwensen,
respectively. They all reflect a tradition that Jacobsen epitomises
- a tradition that seems able to remain true to its roots while
being continually renewed so that it never seems out of date.
Richard Carr
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