Page 34 - Issue 29 - VE Magazine

ForgetIKEA,youcanreallytracetheBritishlove
of Scandi design back to Finnish genius Alvar Aalto
and his company Artek
IBy Karyn Sparks
F YOU RECOGNISE the name of Finnish design com- pany Artek it is probably for its multi-coloured stacking bentwood stools – and you’ll recognise the stools even if you don’t know the name! But it turns out that the history of the company has spanned art, architecture and interiors.
The artist, architect and design genius Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) founded Artek (combining “art” and “tech”) with some friends in 1935, primarily to sell and promote his own furniture and glassware, which he saw as part of the “whole work of art” that he thought his buildings should be. With his first wife and fellow-designer Aino, visual arts promoter Maire Gullichsen and art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl, Aalto created Artek based on their shared values – they wanted to sell only items that were high quality and had long-term durability.
What really strikes you if you look at the photograph of the Artek shop front in Helsinki before the Second World War is how modern it feels: you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at an image from 1970s Britain rather than 1930s Finland! And the same feeling runs through the furniture from that time: the Aaltos certainly brought their own style to the modern furnishings, which were warm and very much inspired by nature and went on to inspire a hundred imitators.
BENTWOOD BEGINNINGS
Aalto had been experimenting with bending the wood of the native birch of his homeland from the late 1920s, inspired by the tubular steel furniture of the Bauhaus (which in turn had taken inspiration from the bentwood
Organic Modernism
34 / August-September 2016 / ve www.vintagexplorer.co.uk
Iconic stacking stools model 60, from 1932-33 from the Aalto design collection. Left: Aino Marsio Aalto and Alvar Aalto in the Artek Pascoe showroom, New York, 1940. From the Aalto Family Collection
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