History
See also: Danish modernIn the late 1940s, shortly after the end of the Second World War, conditions in Denmark were ideally suited to success in design. The emphasis was on furniture but architecture, silver, ceramics, glass and textiles also benefitted from the trend. Denmark's late industrialisation combined with a tradition of high-quality craftsmanship formed the basis of gradual progress towards industrial production. After the end of the war, Europeans were keen to find novel approaches such as the light wood furniture from Denmark. Last but not least, support in Denmark for freedom of individual expression assisted the cause.
The newly established Furniture School at the Royal Danish Academy of Art played a considerable part in the development of furniture design. Kaare Klint taught functionalism based on the size and proportions of objects, wielding considerable influence. Hans J. Wegner, who had been trained as a cabinetmaker, contributed with a unique sense of form, especially in designing chairs.
As head of the cooperative FDB furniture design studio, Børge Mogensen designed simple and robust objects of furniture for the average Danish family. Finn Juhl demonstrated an individualistic approach in designing chairs with an appealing but functional look.
In the early 1950s, the American Charles Eames designed and manufactured chairs of moulded wood and steel pipes. These encouraged Arne Jacobsen to design his worldfamous Ant Chair, Denmark's first industrially manufactured chair.
Poul Kjærholm, Verner Panton and Nanna Ditzel followed a few years later, continuing the successful story of Danish design. Kjærholm worked mainly in steel and leather, Panton left Denmark during the 1960s to continue designing imaginative but highly unconventional plastic chairs while Nanna Ditzel, who also had a strongly individualistic approach, was successful in helping to renew Danish furniture design in the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Danish Design
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)