The Röhsska Museum award committee for the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, decided to award Ilkka Suppanen in 2015 with prize of SEK 1 million. In January 2016 the exhibition of the awarded designer will be touring first time ever at Design Museum Helsinki. 

The award committee’s motivation:
Ilkka Suppanen’s design is characterised by time and thought. Time to thought. With trust and a humanistic eye, he puts substance before style and person before design. In Ilkka Suppanen’s world the complicated is made simple, and the simple large.

Finnish designer Ilkka Suppanen (b. 1968) studied architecture at the Technical University of Helsinki, and Interior and Furniture Design at the University of Arts and Design (Aalto University), also in Helsinki. He completed his design studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, in 1992. In 1995 he founded Studio Suppanen, and since then he has worked with many international clients including Artek, Axis, Cappellini, Ferlea, Leucos, Lucente, Nokia, Zanotta, Marimekko and many more.

Ilkka Suppanen’s products have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Milan Furniture Fair and MoMA in New York. His work has been bought by several major museums including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and The MAKK museum of applied arts in Cologne. Ilkka Suppanen is the founder of Club of Helsinki, an international network of designers, business owners, academics and politicians with a focus on global sustainability.