Famous Finnish designers

Finnish design became world-famous after the Second World War, when Tapio Wirkkala, Kaj Franck, Timo Sarpaneva and Maija Isola won prizes and made glass, porcelain and textiles for Iittala, Arabia and Marimekko. The foundations had been laid earlier: by Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Eliel Saarinen in the National Romanticism of around 1900, and by Alvar Aalto, who in the 1930s gave Modernism soft forms in bent wood and glass. What they share is simple forms, motifs from nature and everyday objects for everyone.

Facts

Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Eliel Saarinen

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931) was a painter, best known for his pictures from the Kalevala, but he also designed furniture, stained-glass windows and ryas. For Finland’s pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 he made the rya Liekki, the Flame, and revived the old technique.

The architect Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950) designed houses, furniture and textiles as unified wholes. With Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren he built the studio home Hvitträsk outside Helsinki, with log walls, tiled stoves and ryas, and he designed Helsinki Central Station. In the United States he later led the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The period is described under Finnish National Romanticism.

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) was an architect but is just as well known for his furniture and his glass. Together with his wife Aino Aalto and the carpenter Otto Korhonen he developed techniques for bending solid birch and plywood, and the L-shaped leg became the basis for stools, chairs and tables. In 1935 the couple helped found Artek to sell the furniture.

Aalto’s Savoy vase was designed for a competition that the Karhula-Iittala glassworks announced in 1936, ahead of the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. The outline is free and undulating, and the vase is still made. His buildings, such as the sanatorium at Paimio, are described in the guide to Alvar Aalto.

Tapio Wirkkala and glass

Tapio Wirkkala (1915–1985) won Iittala’s competition in 1946 with the vase Kantarelli, shaped like a chanterelle with hundreds of fine engraved lines, and received three Grand Prix at the Milan Triennale in 1951. It was there that Finnish design as a whole made its breakthrough. He designed glass, porcelain, cutlery, banknotes and the bottle for Finlandia Vodka, and the Ultima Thule glass series with surfaces like melting ice.

Timo Sarpaneva worked at the same glassworks, making art glass and the coloured i-line, and at Nuutajärvi Oiva Toikka made his glass birds from 1972. Iittala now brings together several of the old glassworks.

Kaj Franck and everyday objects

Kaj Franck (1911–1989) led the design work at Arabia and worked for the glassworks at Nuutajärvi and Iittala. He questioned the large dinner service with an object for every task and made instead Kilta, which appeared in 1953: a few pieces in circle, square and cone, and simple colours that could be bought one at a time and mixed freely.

Kilta was remade in 1981 as Teema and is still produced. Franck’s idea that objects should be anonymous, durable and cheap enough for everyone shaped the whole of Finnish post-war design, as did Ilmari Tapiovaara’s stackable chairs and the orange Fiskars scissors of 1967.

Marimekko and Maija Isola

Marimekko was founded in 1951 by Armi and Viljo Ratia to make dresses from the fabrics that young artists designed. Maija Isola (1927–2001) made hundreds of patterns for the company, and Unikko, the poppy of 1964, became its emblem – even though Armi Ratia had said that Marimekko would not print flowers.

Vuokko Nurmesniemi and Annika Rimala gave Marimekko’s clothes their straight, striped and colourful form. At the same time Eero Aarnio made chairs in plastic, and Björn Weckström made jewellery like lunar landscapes for Lapponia, such as the necklace Planetoid Valleys of 1969.

What makes Finnish design Finnish

What the Finnish designers share is nature as a model – lakes, ice, mushrooms and flowers – but interpreted in simple, austere forms. The objects were intended for everyday life and for many people, and industry and artists worked closely together, as in Arabia’s art department and Iittala’s glassworks.

Read more about the golden age under the Finnish golden age and about the whole Finnish strand in Finnish design history. The guide to Scandinavian design shows how Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway influenced one another.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who designed the Kilta service, whose pieces could be bought one at a time?