68 ARNE JACOBSEN
IN DENMARK, Arne Jacobsen (1902–1971) is remembered as one of the 20th century’s most influential and respected architects. On the international stage, however, it is
his furniture designs that most likely spring to mind when his name is mentioned. His Egg, Swan and Series 7 chairs, for instance, are icons of modern design and remain bestsellers to this day. But he was far more than an architect who also happened to design furniture. As Tomas Dickson and Henrik Lund-Larsen write in the sumptuous new book Te Designs of Arne Jacobsen (Prestel), not only was he ‘one of the most far- reaching and productive innovators of his generation’, but a ‘dedicated creator who may be one of Denmark’s first true industrial designer’. Teir richly illustrated and rigorously researched volume traces the remarkable trajectory of Jacobsen’s career as a designer, from his early experiments with functionalism, to his most celebrated modern designs and lesser-known gems, such as his many textile designs. Jacobsen believed in ‘total design’,
conceiving and creating every aspect of a building himself, from its architecture to its fittings, fixtures, textiles, lighting and furniture. His clean, functional aesthetic and material restraint produced a number of celebrated Danish buildings, including the SAS Royal Hotel (1960), the magnificent town halls of Aarhus (1941), Søllerød (1942) and Rødovre (1956), and Munkegård school. He also left his mark in Britain with the brutalist Saint Catherine’s College (1966) in Oxford and the space age-like Royal Danish Embassy (1977) in London. Over four decades he designed 400 buildings, 150 textile patterns, 100 furniture designs and ten major product collections. Yet despite his commitment to innovative design, he saw himself primarily as an architect. As the book’s authors note, he loathed the word designer, considering it ‘an English buzzword’. Jacobsen grew up in the Østerbro district
of Copenhagen, though from the fifth grade he attended boarding school in the town of Nærum. It was here that his talent for drawing and painting was discovered and his desire to pursue architecture subsequently led him in 1924 to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Architecture, where his training rested on a solid classical foundation. But Jacobsen was a talented and enterprising architect who intuitively understood where architecture was headed. After a few years working for the city architect in Copenhagen, he established an independent practice. By 1930 he had already designed several villas and other residential developments, including his own strikingly modern, functionalist house in Ordrup – a sleek, flat-roofed building that appeared to be made of white concrete but was, in fact, plastered brickwork. Despite Jacobsen’s penchant for the
functionalism pioneered by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, his early clients
Jacobsen believed in ‘total design’, conceiving and creating each aspect of a building himself – from its architecture to its fittings, fixtures, textiles, lighting and furniture
preferred less radical ideas, and so villas in yellow and red stone with gabled roofs became his signature style in the municipality of Gentofte. He later landed commissions for multi-storey buildings and began entering competitions, often in collaboration with Flemming Lassen and Erik Møller. With Møller he secured the commission for Aarhus City Hall in 1937, and with Lassen the commission for Søllerød Town Hall in 1939. Both projects were built simultaneously and reflect a more subdued, Nordic version of modernism, one quite detached from Jacobsen’s ultra-modern
Right The Aarhus City Hall spiral staircase leading up from the basement
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