Scandinavian Design

Alternative Histories

Kjetil Fallan, Kjetil Fallan

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857852182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Product Design

Scandinavian design is still seen as democratic, functional and simple, its products exemplifying the same characteristics now as they have done since the 1950s. But both the essence and the history of Scandinavian design are much more complex than this. Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories presents a radically new assessment, a corrective to the persistent mythologies and reductive accounts of Scandinavian design.The book brings together case studies from the early twentieth century to today. Drawn from fields as diverse as transport, engineering, packaging, photography, law, interiors, and corporate identity, these studies tell new or unfamiliar stories about the production, mediation and consumption of design. An alternative history is created, one much more alive to national and regional differences and to types of product. Scandinavian Design analyses a century of design culture from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and, in so doing, presents a sophisticated introduction to Scandinavian design.

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A Historiography of Scandinavian Design

Kjetil Fallan, Anders V. Munch, Pekka Korvenmaa, Espen Johnsen, Sara Kristoffersson and Christina Zetterlund

PAN-SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE

In contrast to the common currency awarded to Scandinavian design as a terminological concept, there is actually relatively little design history writing that has a pan-Scandinavian or pan-Nordic scope, that is literature covering design history in Scandinavia as a whole. A partial exception is the segment known as coffee table books, which exist in abundance on Scandinavian design: lavishly illustrated, extravagantly designed, generous in format, hagiographic and mythopoeic in style. Coffee table books are significant in the sense that they perhaps more than anything have helped perpetuate the myths, personality cult and fetishism permeating the popular image of Scandinavian design. However, as the scholarly value of such publications is minimal, they will be omitted from the current discussion.

Beyond the coffee table book segment (which also includes so-called sourcebooks), one category of publications seems to dominate the pan-Scandinavian literature: exhibition catalogues. Some of these, like those accompanying the Design in Scandinavia exhibition that toured North America from 1954 to 1957 and the identically titled show sent to Australia in 1968–9, although they do contain (cursory) historical essays, are of interest first and foremost as primary sources elucidating the role of design in the cultural diplomacy and the construction of Scandinavian Design as a brand.¹ Other exhibition catalogues contain more substantial texts and may therefore be considered contributions to the academic literature, albeit with the constraints and conventions that follow from the exhibition catalogue format. Although the later, more scholarly ambitious publications that have done much to historicize the phenomenon are less overtly promotional in character than the texts produced as part of the contemporary events co-constructing the concept of Scandinavian Design in the 1950s and 1960s, they by and large retain the endorsing function and celebratory tone of their predecessors. In principle, exhibitions may of course be critical in character. But due to their official status, the structure of their funding and the purpose they serve as generators of goodwill, exhibitions on Scandinavian design—and the accompanying publications—rarely, if ever, surpass the promotional rhetoric and rationale.

In the aftermath of what is often perceived as the ‘golden days’ of Scandinavian design—the 1950s and early 1960s—the desire to recapture past pride and resuscitate the international recognition of the brand spurred new exhibitions and publications. The most ambitious events of a pan-Scandinavian character have generally been played at away ground, targeting foreign audiences, but the rescue mission was taken to the home front as well. While a show called Exposicao de desenho industrial da Escandinàvia toured Brazil, in 1971 the Röhsska Museum of Decorative Arts in Gothenburg staged an exhibition of Nordic industrial design conceived as a continuation of an established tradition of Nordic collaboration in the field of design cultural diplomacy. A similar event took place five years later, when on the occasion of the centennial of Oslo’s Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in 1976, its direction argued that ‘such information on where Nordic industrial design stands today is at least as important at home in the Nordic region as it is abroad’, and organized a touring exhibition with the hope that it would not only improve the understanding of design culture amongst the home public ‘but also stimulate the industrial designers themselves, so that Nordic industrial design will be able to retain its reputation in a global context’.² In its campaigning for the industrial design profession, Alf Bøe’s catalogue essay is coloured by his background as Director of the Norwegian Design Centre, but it is interesting how he seeks to inscribe industrial design into a history of Scandinavian design hitherto dominated by the decorative arts.³ To Bøe, who also wrote the catalogue essay for the 1971 exhibition at the Röhsska Museum, the increasingly prominent role played by industrial design since the 1960s represented a new twist on the trope of social responsibility so carefully constructed in the prevalent historical narratives of Scandinavian design.⁴

One of the first exhibitions that can be said to have a commemorative function and that featured a more substantial publication was the Form og Funktion show at Sophienholm in Lyngby, Denmark, in 1980—an event explicitly intended as a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. The catalogue includes reprints of programmatic texts by Gregor Paulsson and Poul Henningsen as well as historical and critical essays by contemporary scholars.⁵ A smaller exhibition of Nordic craft and design took place at Maihaugen in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1981, accompanied by a catalogue including an essay by Fredrik Wildhagen in which he emphasizes the role of the national design organizations’ intra-Nordic collaboration in postwar Scandinavian design.⁶ Focusing on a single but central institution in the ‘golden age’ of Scandinavian design, the Lunning Prize, awarded to Nordic designers from 1951 to 1970, Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum celebrated the award’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1986 with an exhibition and bilingual catalogue containing retrospective essays deliberating Scandinavian Design as an idea and an epoch, as well as presentations of the forty designers honoured over the two decades.⁷

The first large-scale retrospective exhibition on Scandinavian Design outside Scandinavia took place in 1982 when the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York organized Scandinavian Modern: 1880–1980, accompanied by a large and lavishly designed catalogue.⁸ To date, this remains one of the most comprehensive and conscientious surveys of Scandinavian design history available in English, although its commemorative tone and connoisseurial approach appear somewhat outmoded thirty years down the road. Another major museum in the sector has also contributed to the international literature on Scandinavian design: in 1989 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London made use of its own collection to produce the exhibition and catalogue Scandinavia: Ceramics and Glass in the Twentieth Century.⁹ Highly conventional in its subject matter and in its analytical perspective, this publication is probably more a contribution to the history of decorative art in ceramics and glass than to the history of Scandinavian design.

The most recent contribution to this strand of publications is Scandinavian Design beyond the Myth, the textual companion to a travelling exhibition that toured European cities from 2003 to 2007.¹⁰ Despite the ambitions of the project and the merits of the individual essays, this publication is problematic in several respects. First of all, like most exhibition catalogues it does not work well on its own. More concerning, though, is that its title is misleading, as the book is a parade of ‘great’ designs and ‘great’ designers and thus contributes to the perpetuation rather than the challenging of myths. The ‘beyond’ of the title, then, implies continuance rather than disclosure—the catalogue includes contemporary design portrayed as a projection of that of the ‘golden age’, giving the project a decisively promotional character. But, then, this is hardly surprising given that the exhibition was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers.

A celebratory and promotional character is not restricted to exhibition catalogues. In fact, the majority of publications with a pan-Scandinavian scope seem to have been conceived of primarily to generate goodwill for the region’s design culture. Prime examples are a couple of books from the early 1960s by Ulf Hård af Segerstad: one on Nordic decorative art and one on modern Scandinavian furniture design.¹¹ In these texts, history is present but is consistently treated as an explanation for the character of contemporary practice, rather than being studied for its own sake—an instrumental and legitimizing outlook prevalent in much of this type of literature. Although less blatant in style, this is true also of the most comprehensive work in this category, a 1961 volume whose US edition is entitled A Treasury of Scandinavian Design, edited by Erik Zahle.¹² Nevertheless, this book has for half a century proved a valuable resource for those—particularly non-Scandinavians—seeking an introduction to Scandinavian design history. More polemical than promotional, Viggo Sten Møller’s 1978 book on functionalism and applied art in Scandinavia reflects the ageing modernist author’s oscillations between resignation and zest but still comprises a compendious but not uncritical historical account, including historiographic remarks.¹³

Of all the eulogies pronounced on Scandinavian design, none is more flagrant than Eileene H. Beer’s Scandinavian Design: Objects of a Life Style. Rather than arising from academic ambitions, this book was conceived con amore, and through the most romanticizing wordings we learn, for example, that ‘Scandinavians have instinctively been aware that one cannot create something pretty in the hope that it might also be useful, but an object made to perform a function can always be pleasing in form’.¹⁴ This form of stereotyping of character and naturalizing of modernist design ideology is disturbing on many levels and goes to show how being flattered by others can be as awkward and unseemly as self-flattery.

Literature on Scandinavian design with higher academic ambitions has tended to be more national than pan-Scandinavian in scope. However, the establishment of the Nordic Forum for Design History in 1982 provided a network for scholars in the field and a platform for publications. A few conference proceedings were produced, on topics like Nordic functionalism and the still very current issue of the place of industrial design in museums.¹⁵ More important, this community also formed the basis for the Scandinavian Journal of Design History, published as an annual from 1991 to 2005. Individual articles in the journal were normally not pan-Scandinavian in scope,¹⁶ but taken as a whole this project is perhaps the most comprehensive publication on design history in Scandinavia.

Amongst the few English-language survey texts that largely eschew the celebratory tone, the chapters on the Scandinavian countries in the three-volume History of Industrial Design edited by Carlo Pirovano stand out. Spanning the period 1750 to 1990 in a mere forty-five pages combined, Christine Stevenson, Lars Dybdahl and Fredrik Wildhagen do a good job of presenting design from Scandinavia in a fairly balanced manner.¹⁷ On the whole there are very few scholarly monographs taking a regional perspective, at least of a more recent date. One rare exception is Ingeborg Glambek’s book on the foreign reception of a ‘Nordic’ identity in architecture and design.¹⁸ Although reception history is an established approach in art history, it has been little applied to design history—at least in Scandinavia—and the book therefore represents a refreshing perspective. Leaving the relatively sparse pan-Scandinavian literature behind, we now move on to surveys of design history literature in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which combined will complement this outline for a historiography of Scandinavian design.

DENMARK

Not much has been published internationally on the history of Danish design beyond the illustrated presentations of the most famous designers and most worshipped objects of Danish design. You can find vast amounts of stories and even quite detailed historical facts on Danish designers and especially on the ‘furniture classics’ on the Internet, but such accounts tend to have too many heroes, and these protagonists are in fact often too obscure for an interesting historical narrative to emerge.

In the more scholarly literature, the international contextualization of Danish design has been a prevailing topic. For instance, the single most celebrated Danish designer in recent years, Arne Jacobsen, is predominantly acknowledged for his appropriation of American postwar impulses. Still, most discussions of the historical development are inwardly focused on the roles of the same persons, exhibitions and a few companies, and it seems that ‘usual suspects’ such as Kaare Klint and Poul Henningsen are considered difficult to present in an international context. The latter is of course known internationally for his lamps, but his critical writings on design and culture had a far wider importance.¹⁹ The conventional understanding of the national character of Danish applied art that was established early on, especially in the wake of the World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1900, was that the Danes were not influenced by any international styles; their work was resistant to style as such, it was claimed.²⁰ This attitude has been rehearsed time and again at later points in the history of Danish design, for example in the case of functionalism, the Danish adaptation of which is habitually presented as the reawakening of age-old traditions in handicraft and architecture—often evidenced through historicist examples, no less. These rather restricted notions of the nation’s design history stem, of course, from the ideological and political fights of the design professions and institutions, but they nevertheless have had a strong impact on the subject material even for later design historians, partly as ready templates for use in the presentation of familiar narratives, partly as mythological constructs to be challenged.

In Denmark, as in many other countries, architects played a dominant role in establishing design as a profession, discourse and institution. Critics, teachers and directors of design schools were usually the more theoretically trained architects. But on top of that Denmark has had its core of ‘furniture architects’ fighting over the power to control the legacy of the so-called Klint School and thereby the right to define the ‘timeless’ qualities of the genuine classics of the golden age of Danish furniture design. In this outline of literature on Danish design I include key books on furniture, because this dominant topic has provoked some of the most advanced questions about the development of design in the contexts of society, economics, culture and media. There are many fine studies, especially from the Design Museum Denmark, of other special fields such as posters, textiles, silver and ceramics that are relevant to the historiography of Danish design, but they are omitted in this short presentation. As argued in the first sectio...