Artek (company)

Artek is a Finnish furniture company. It was founded in December, 1935 by architect Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino Aalto, visual arts promoter Maire Gullichsen (Ahlström — Gullichsen family) and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl. The main aim of the venture was to promote the furniture and glassware of Alvar Aalto and Aino Aalto, and to produce furnishings for their buildings.

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 or frivolous ornamentation.

Representative furniture

Paimio Chair

From the very beginning of his career Alvar Aalto experimented with materials, especially wood, and even applied for patents for the bending of wood as applied in his furniture designs and as acoustic screens in his buildings. The Aaltos designed several different types of furniture and lamps for the Paimio Sanatorium (1929-33). The best known of the furniture pieces is his cantilevered birch wood Paimio Chair, which was specifically designed for tuberculosis patients to sit in for long hours each day. Aalto argued that the angle of the back of the chair was the perfect angle for the patient to breathe most easily. The design of the chair may have been influenced by Marcel Breuer's metal Wassily Chair, though Aalto was generally negative towards metal furniture. [ Bayley, Stephen, Conran, Terance Design: Intelligence Made Visible. Firefly Books. 2007 pp. 63-64 ] The degree of bending of the wood tested the technical limits of that time. The chair is part of the permanent collections at the MoMA in New York and the Finnish Design Museum.

3 Leg Stool 60

The Model No. 60 stool, designed circa 1932-1933, demonstrated Alvar Aalto's interest in basic functional, utilitarian forms. It was constructed of bent laminated birch, and originally came in all natural (plain) or curled birch, or with a black, red, or blue seat with natural (plain) legs.

3 Leg Stool X600

The X600 evolved from the 60. The handmade legs have the portions attached to the seat opening up into a fan, showing simultaneously the bent wood characteristic of Artek furniture and the fan motif that runs through Aalto's architecture.

References

External links

* [http://www.artek.fi/ Company home page]