Icon: Preben Fabricius & Jørgen Kastholm

Fabricius & Kastholm met each other at the School of Interior design, subsequently formed a partnership and together founded an architect’s office in 1961. They specialised in designing furniture and single-family housing. Although they have individually created some interesting designs, it is in partnership that they have achieved their greatest successes. Their furniture is elegant, refined, and designed with an amazing sense of functionality, detail and quality.
Preben Fabricius (left) [1931-1984] He served his apprenticeship as a cabinet maker with master joiner Niels Vodder in 1952, followed by a course at the School of Interior Design. On completing his studies he was employed by architect Ole Hagen.
Jorgen Kastholm, (right) [1931-2007] first trained as a blacksmith, and later as an architect at the school of interior design, he worked for a period of time with Arne Jacobsen, who became an inspiration to him, he later travelled to Beirut, where he designed the local SAS office (Scandinavian Airlines System). Since then Kastholm has had a successful career and received many prizes and awards.

[from top to bottom] Grasshopper Chair, FK82 X Chair, FK Lounge Chair, Skater Chair, Scimitar Chair, by Fabricius & Kastholm

Icon: George Nelson Designer

George Nelson (1908-1986) was an important modernist whose work cut across the fields of interior, industrial and exhibition design. Nelson studied architecture at Yale University in the 1920s, and in the next two decades earned a strong reputation as a writer on design for Architectural Forum, Interiors and Fortune. In 1945 Nelson began a long association with the Herman Miller Furniture Company of Zeeland, Michigan, where as head designer he developed an innovative line of furniture and commissioned new designs from others. His first commission was Isamu Noguchi’s biomorphic glass-topped coffee table, which began production in 1947, the first of many designs that the sculptor would create for Herman Miller in the late Forties. Nelson also was responsible for bringing the designs of Charles Eames to Herman Miller, and he collaborated with R. Buckminster Fuller on a number of projects. Among Nelson’s own creations are classic works of Fifties design, including the bubble lamp, ball clock, marshmallow sofa and the pole-supported wall-storage system.

The Vitra Design Museum at Weil am Rhein in Germany is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Nelson’s birth with a retrospective of his work, opening Sept. 13. “Although Nelson was one of the most important American designers and design writers, it’s almost as if we are introducing him in Europe and reintroducing him in the U.S.,” said Jochen Eisenbrand, the exhibition’s curator. “Most people, even those interested in design, may not know much more about him than a few design classics.”

Read more: American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and George Nelson’s bold look went beyond future schlock, at IHT

Icon: Alberto Meda

Alberto Meda came to design from engineering, bringing with him a pragmatic mind, an attention to details in materials and production process, in addition to formal concerns. This applied-science background has shaped Meda’s recognizable stamp of elegant simplicity, designs that are at once modern in form and organic in feel.

Meda started his career in the 1970s as the technical director of the plastics manufacturer Kartell. There he began to forge a unique relationship between technology and design experimentation, incorporating poetry as well as engineering into his imaginative solutions. He subsequently opened his own office in Milan.

Meda believes that “the more complex the technology, the more it is suitable for the production of objects for simple use, with a unitary image, almost organic.” He demonstrated this idea with the Light Light Armchair, his first carbon–fiber chair, manufactured in a small series. The chair, which weighs a mere four pounds, is a physical and psychological representation of lightness.

Company site: Alberto Meda, Interview: Metropolis Magazine

See more products designed by Alberto Meda

Icon: Marcel Breuer

Marcel Lajos Breuer was born in the provincial city of Pecs, Hungary. His early study and teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s introduced him to three older giants of the era that had a life-long influence upon his professional career – Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.

Breuer left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin in 1928 and then moved to England in 1935 when the Nazis made it impossible for anyone who had been a part of the Bauhaus to practice architecture. In 1937, Breuer joined Walter Gropius in his architectural practice and also became a professor at Harvard. Breuer moved to New York in 1946 to found his own architectural firm, and like Le Corbusier, Breuer chose concrete as his medium of choice. He used concrete in his design of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.

Marcel Breuer’s most recognized furniture design was the first bent tubular steel chair, known as the Wassily Chair. The Wassily Chair was designed in 1925 and inspired by the curved tubular steel handlebars on Breuer’s Adler bicycle. He designed his famous Wassily chair for painter Wassily Kandinsky, Breuer’s colleague on the Bauhaus faculty. Kandinsky admired Breuer’s finished chair design so much that did Breuer made an additional copy for Kandinsky to use in his home. When the Italian manuafcturer re-released the chair in the 1960s, they designated the name “Wassily” after they had learned that Kandinsky had been the recipient of one of the earliest post-prototype units.

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) Biography

Link: Breuer Trailer House

Icon: Nanna Ditzel

Nanna Ditzel’s career has spanned five decades, Born in Copenhagen in 1923, she would later become an apprentice cabinetmaker at the Richards School before completing her education at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In the same year that she graduated from the Academy she and her first husband, Jorgen Ditzel, established a design studio in order to continue their already fruitful collaboration.
During this period of her career she designed several signature pieces like the “Hanging” or “Basket” chair that could be suspended from the ceiling and serves as a remarkable example of the Ditzel’s experiments with wicker. In 1954 Nanna and Jorgen began creating jewelry for Georg Jensen. These designs would win them both gold and silver medals at the Milan Trienalle. Using the rippling of little waves across the surface of water as an important source of inspiration Nanna Ditzel created, throughout her career, jewelry that communicates an elegant interpretation of simple organic form. Collaboration with her husband also produced a series of children’s furniture the most notable of which is the “Toadstool” which was a stackable piece that could serve as either stool or table.

Official site: Nanna Ditzel

Icon: James Irvine

James Irvine (Born London 1958) studied furniture design first at Kingston University and then at the Royal College of Art. One of his closest friends at both institutions was his fellow designer Jasper Morrison who remains a friend and occasional collaborator today. After graduating from the RCA in 1984, Irvine worked first at Olivetti’s design studio in Milan and then for Toshiba in Tokyo before returning to Milan in 1988. He continued to work for Olivetti under the guidance of Ettore Sottsass, and in 1992 became a partner in Sottsass’ studio. Since leaving Sottsass Associati in 1998 to concentrate on his own projects, Irvine has developed products for companies such as Arabia, Artemide, Asplund, B&B Italia, Canon, Danese, Magis and Whirlpool as well as working on ambitious public projects such as the design of the Mercedes Benz city fleet of buses for Hannover.

Link: James Irvine Furniture and Industrial Design

Icon: Poul Henningsen

Poul Henningsen (1894-1967) was born in Ordrup, Denmark, he trained as an architect at the Danish College of Technology in Copenhagen. Finding the style of traditional lighting designs to be insufficient for his interiors he began designing his own solutions. He was depressed by “how dismal people’s homes are,” and realised that “electric light gave the possibility of wallowing in light.” Henningsen was evangelistic towards the development of modern lighting.

His two most successful designs the “PH lamp,” designed in 1924 and the “Artichoke” have become icons of modern design.
The “PH” lamp, also callled the “Paris” lamp because of its award winning appearance at the Paris World Exhibition incorporates tiers of shades, allowing the user to direct light in several different directions without exposing the light source. The Artichoke is considered to be a classical masterpiece designed by Poul Henningsen more than 40 years ago. The structure is made of twelve steel arches. On this structure he placed 72 copper “leaves” in twelve circular rows with six blades in each row. Because each row is staggered from the previous, all 72 leaves are able to “cover for each other”.

Poul Henningsen Biography

Icon: Inga Sempé

“She designs with force, without making any concessions, and that’s what interests me — even if at times it can be a bit difficult”
- Michel Roset, co-owner of Ligne Roset.

France’s hottest designer Inga Sempé (b. 1968), graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI) in Paris in 1993 at the age of 25. She also won a scholarship for a year’s studies at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici). She achieved a complete breakthrough at the Milan Furniture Fair, where her wilful Brosse shelf was shown. The shelf, which has ‘curtains’ made of bristles from sweeping brushes, was displayed in Edra’s showroom and attracted a lot of attention. Since then, Sempé has been a hot name in the design media throughout Europe. Her first exhibition was held last summer at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Inga Sempé has worked with George Sowden (1989), Marc Newson (1994) and Andrée Putman (1997-99).

+ Inga Sempé
More at the New York Times

Icon: Harry Bertoia

Having worked for Charles and Ray Eames and Hans and Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia garnered icon status as a designer when he created the Bertoia Collection for Knoll in 1952. Italian-born, Bertoia utilized his superior skills as a sculptor to bend and shape industrial wire rods into chairs that would become pinnacles of twentieth century furniture design. Now considered modern classics, the collection was so commercially successful that it allowed Bertoia to dedicate himself exclusively to his main artistic passion: sculpting.

Biography: Harry Bertoia

Icon: Hans Wegner

Hans J. Wegner (1914 – 2007).
Born in 1914: Tønder, Denmark where he completed his early education and was trained as a cabinet maker. In 1936, at the age of 22 he attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen, returning later as a tutor.
He worked as an assistant to Erik Møller and Arne Jacobsen until 1943, helping on their design for the Århus Town Hall, and adding some of his own furniture. In 1943 he opened his own office and came out with the Chinese chair which, along with his 1949 “Round” chair would provide the basis for many of his later chairs.

Interiors magazine, in America, put the Round chair on the cover in 1950 and called it ‘the world’s most beautiful chair,’ catapulting Wegner into international fame and sparking a profitable export market. It became known simply as,The Chair and began making high profile appearances like the televised 1961 presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy. Of the design Wegner said, “many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I’ve answered that it…was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest.”

Inspired by classical portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs, Wegner created series of chairs that helped establish Denmark as an international leader of modern design. Of this seies the Wishbone Chair is widely considered to be his most successful design.

In the early 1960s he came out with several variations on the Bull chair which came with or without horns, and was a fine example of the line Wegner could masterfully walk between elegance and playfulness. “We must take care,” he once said, “that everything doesn’t get so dreadfully serious. We must play – but we must play seriously.”
- Danish Design

Teddy Bear Chair, Circle Chair, CH 07, Wishbone Chair, Bull Chair.
Biography: Hans Wegner

Recommended reading: Danish Chairs