Design furniture: Egg Chair  ,  Swan Chair  ,  Super-Circular Table  ,  Arne Jacobsen Coffee Table  ,  Ant Chair

Arne Jacobsen was one of Denmark’s most famous designers. He created many iconic furniture pieces that became an extremely popular Danish Modern style. Many of his classic designs, including the Egg chair, Swan chair and Series 7 chair were designed in the early 1950s.

These pieces are still very popular today as witnessed by sales of over 5 million series 7 chairs since its inception in 1955. Though he is well known for such famous buildings as the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, St. Catherine’s College in Oxford and the Danish National Bank in Copenhagen, Arne Jacobsen designed flatware, lighting, door handles, and even sinks.

His design of right and left handed flatware was used in the Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Biography

1902 Born in Copenhagen.

1924 Enrols as an architecture student at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen.

1925 Wins a silver medal for a chair design at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris where he discovers Le Corbusier's work.

1927 Visits Berlin where he sees the architecture of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. Wins a gold medal on graduating from the Royal Academy.

1930 After years of designing private houses as a young architect, Jacobsen wins his first public project to modernise the beach at Bellevue.

1935 Completes the groundbreaking Bellavista apartment blocks, now regarded as a classic of the Danish modern movement, in Klampenborg.

1935 Designs the controversial Stelling Hus building in Copenhagen.

1943 Begins two years of wartime exile in Sweden where he concentrates on textile and wallpaper design and a summer house for two doctors.

1945 Returns to Denmark in peacetime to spend several years working on housing and schools.

1950 Starts a five year project to design the Søholm series of houses in Klampenborg, which mark the start of a looser, more experimental phase.

1951 Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' furniture, Jacobsen designs the moulded plywood Ant Chair, later refined into

1955's best-selling Series 7.

1956 Designs two upholstered chairs - the Egg and Swan - for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen as well as the stainless steel cutlery later chosen by Stanley Kubrick as a prop in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1957 Completes the circular Round House on the island of Sjaellands as the culmination of his experiments with the "houses of the future".

1960 Wins the commission to design St Catherine's College, Oxford. He insists on designing the fixtures, fittings and garden as well as the buildings.

1961 SAS Royal Hotel opens in Copenhagen as the apogee of Jacobsen's ambition to design a building in its entirety down to the smallest fixtures.

1964 The futuristic Belvedere Restaurant opens in Hannover above an early 18th century garden. Jacobsen begins a three year collaboration with Stelton, run by his foster son Peter Holmblad, on the Cylinda Line cocktail kit.

1966 Jacobsen wins the competition to design the new National Bank of Denmark headquarters in Copenhagen. Construction continues after his death with the building opening in 1978.

1971 Arne Jacobsen dies in Copenhagen.

Design furniture: CF026   CF027    CF162    CF815   CF036