Arne Jacobsen

Arne Jacobsen
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Designer of the Ant and the Egg.

Arne Jacobsen was an architect and designer who created total works down to the smallest detail, such as the SAS hotel in Copenhagen.

Arne Jacobsen was born in Copenhagen in 1902 into a Jewish family. He first wanted to be a painter but trained as a bricklayer and then as an architect at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. While still a student he won a silver medal for a chair at the 1925 World's Fair in Paris.

In the 1930s he designed functionalist buildings along the coast north of Copenhagen, including the Bellavista housing estate and the Bellevue lido with its theatre. With Erik Møller he designed Aarhus City Hall, built in 1937–42. In 1943, as a Jew, he was forced to flee to Sweden, where he designed textiles and wallpapers until he could return after the war.

In 1952 he designed the Ant chair for the furniture company Fritz Hansen. It consists of a single piece of moulded plywood on thin steel legs. It was followed by the Series 7 chair of 1955, one of the best-selling chairs ever. For the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, which opened in 1960, Jacobsen designed everything from the building to the furniture, lamps, textiles and cutlery. The Egg and Swan armchairs were made for the hotel. One of the rooms is preserved in its original state. His cutlery was later used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Jacobsen also designed St Catherine's College in Oxford and Danmarks Nationalbank in Copenhagen, which was completed after his death. He designed the Cylinda line in stainless steel for Stelton and taps for Vola. He was known for working very meticulously and controlling every detail, and he was considered a demanding boss.

Arne Jacobsen died in 1971. His furniture and objects are still in production and have become symbols of Danish modernism. He is regarded as one of the first to think of architecture and design as a single coherent whole.