Kaare Klint — Father of Danish Furniture Design

Kaare Klint (1888–1954) is the foundational figure in Danish furniture design. As a designer, he produced a small but precisely resolved body of work that drew on historical precedent to address contemporary function. As a teacher at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he formed a generation of designers — among them Ole Wanscher, Mogens Koch and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen — who would carry his principles through the postwar decades and establish Danish furniture as an international reference.

Background and Training

Klint was the son of the architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, best known for the Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen. He trained as a painter and architect, establishing a practice that combined architectural commissions with furniture design from the early 1910s. His approach to furniture was shaped by an architectural sensibility: he thought about pieces in relation to the spaces they occupied and the human bodies that used them, rather than as objects to be designed independently of their context.

The Faaborg Museum Chairs — A Method Established

Klint’s chairs for the Faaborg Museum (1914) are among the earliest demonstrations of his method. Commissioned to furnish a new museum on the island of Funen, he designed seating that derived its proportions from systematic measurement of how bodies occupy chairs — seat height, seat depth, back angle, armrest height. This functional anthropometry, combined with references to historical chair types (English Shaker, Egyptian folding chairs), established the approach that would define his subsequent work and his teaching.

The Safari Chair — A Type Perfected

The Safari Chair (1933), produced by Rud. Rasmussen, is Klint’s most widely known piece and the work that best demonstrates his method of working from historical types. Based on the folding safari and campaign chairs used by British officers in colonial contexts — itself derived from ancient Egyptian folding stools — Klint’s version retains the essential structural logic of the original while refining its proportions, improving its materials (ash frame, canvas or leather seat and back) and resolving its joinery with Danish craft precision. The result is a chair that feels both historically grounded and entirely contemporary.

Kunstakademiet and the Klint School

In 1924 Klint was appointed to lead the furniture design programme at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademiet) in Copenhagen — the first such position in Denmark. His curriculum was distinctive and influential: students were required to undertake systematic study of historical furniture types before designing anything, on the principle that understanding existing solutions was a precondition for improving them. This archaeological approach to design history, combined with rigorous functional analysis, produced designers who knew why furniture was the way it was and how to make it better. The so-called Klint school — the generation trained under him — dominated Danish furniture design through the 1950s and 1960s.

Other Works and Collaborations

Beyond the Safari Chair, Klint’s furniture output includes the Red Chair (1927), the Deck Chair (1933) and the Barcelona Chair — all produced by Rud. Rasmussen, a manufacturer whose commitment to craft production made it an ideal partner for Klint’s quality-focused approach. He also designed lighting, interiors and exhibition installations, always applying the same principle of functional resolution informed by historical understanding.

Legacy

Klint died in Copenhagen in 1954, having established a tradition that shaped Danish furniture design for at least two subsequent generations. His direct students became the designers most associated with the golden age of Danish furniture: Wanscher, Koch, Mølgaard-Nielsen, Hans J. Wegner (who studied at the same institution in the same period, absorbing the same principles). His insistence that good design is achieved through knowledge and discipline rather than inspiration alone remains the most durable element of his legacy.