Eero Aarnio, born in Helsinki on 21 July 1932, is the Finnish designer who took plastic seriously at the moment his Nordic contemporaries were still refining wood. Over sixty years he has produced a body of work built on fibreglass, colour and geometry — the Ball Chair, the Bubble, the Pastil, the Tomato, the Pony — that reads as pop from a distance and as engineering close up. He is still working, and his studio is at eeroaarnio.com.
Salo, 1963
Aarnio studied at the Institute of Industrial Arts in Helsinki from 1954 to 1957, worked as a designer at Asko in Lahti from 1960 to 1962, and opened his own office in Helsinki in 1962. He had a rattan practice behind him — his first designs were woven, and one of them took third prize at Cantù in 1959.
He drew the Ball Chair on 11 January 1963. It came from a domestic problem rather than a formal one: he wanted a large chair for his own home and could not find one, so he designed a room inside a chair. The first prototype was built in a workshop in Salo with the help of his brother-in-law, in fibreglass, because no other material would hold that shape at that size.
It was shown at the Cologne furniture fair in 1966 and sold into thirty countries inside a week.
The plastic years
What followed was a decade of work that could not have been made any other way. The Pastil of 1967 — a rounded disc that rocks on floor, snow or water — won the International Design Award of the American Institute of Interior Designers the following year. The Bubble of 1968 hung the same idea from the ceiling in clear acrylic, blown like glass against a steel ring, because Aarnio wanted the enclosure of the Ball without losing the light. The Tomato of 1971 set three spheres against each other. The Pony of 1973 was a chair shaped as an animal, which children understood immediately and adults argued about.
Asko produced most of it. When the oil crisis made plastic furniture suddenly expensive and unfashionable, production stopped, and the pieces spent the best part of two decades out of the catalogue before the German manufacturer Adelta reissued them from 1991.
Continuing work
Aarnio never treated the 1960s as the end of the argument. The Screw table arrived in 1991, the Formula chair in 1998, the Parabel table, the Copacabana, a series of lamps. The Trioli children’s chair for Magis in 2003 — one moulding that becomes three different seats depending on which way it is turned — won the Compasso d’Oro in 2008. Later work has included the Kubo and Ghost lamps, both Red Dot winners, and The Tree.
Since 2016 his designs have been made by Aarnio Originals, the company set up to bring production back under his own control and to the original specifications.
Recognition
Aarnio was made an honorary member of the Finnish Association of Interior Architects in 1999, received the Finland Prize from the Ministry of Education in 2005, an honorary professorship in 2007, the Kaj Franck Design Prize in 2008, the Pro Finlandia Medal in 2010 and the Swedish Prince Eugen Medal in 2017. His work is held by MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk, the Vitra Design Museum and Design Museum Helsinki, among some two dozen public collections.
https://eeroaarnio.com
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Biography
Born 21 July 1932 in Helsinki, Finland
School of Applied Arts, Helsinki, 1954–57
Married Pirkko Attila, 1956
Children: Marja-Leena, 1959, and Rea, 1961
Designer, Asko Oy, Lahti, 1960–62
Own design office, Helsinki, from 1962
Eero Aarnio Design Studio GmbH, Cologne, 1978–82
Design studio, Tapiola, Finland, from 1982
Eero Aarnio T:mi, Veikkola, Finland, 1992
Aarnio Design Ltd., Veikkola, Finland, 2001
Awards
1958 Valmet Trade Mark Competition, Helsinki — first prize
1959 International Furniture Competition, Cantù, Italy — third prize
1963 Export Furniture Competition, Helsinki — third prize
1964 International Competition on Furniture Design, Cantù, Italy — first prize
1965 Scandinavian Park and Street Competition, Stockholm — first prize
1967 Steel Furniture Competition, Helsinki — second prize
1968 International Design Award, American Institute of Interior Designers, New York, for the Pastil Chair
1999 Honorary member, SIO, Finnish Association of Interior Architects
2005 The Finland Prize, Ministry of Education
2006 Interior Innovation Award, Cologne
2007 Professor h.c.
2008 ADI Compasso d’Oro, Italy, for the Trioli chair
2008 Kaj Franck Design Prize, Finland
2010 Red Dot Design Award, Germany, for the Kubo light
2010 Pro Finlandia Medal, Finland
2010 Green Good Design, USA, for The Tree
2012 Red Dot Design Award, Germany, for the Ghost lamp
2017 Prince Eugen Medal, Sweden
Solo exhibitions
2001 That’s It, Art Gallery Árvore, Porto
2003 Eero Aarnio, Kunsthalle Helsinki
2004 Eero Aarnio — popfantasier og sittende dagdrømmer, Kunstindustrimuseet, Oslo
2005 Forestil dig en rund stol, Danish Design Center, Copenhagen
2005 Pop Fantasies: Furniture Design by Eero Aarnio, Embassy of Finland, Washington DC
2007 Fantasías del Pop: El diseño de Eero Aarnio, Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City
2007 Eero Aarnio — Retropop, Phantasie und Tagträume, Embassy of Finland, Berlin
2008 The Kaj Franck Design Prize 2008 — Eero Aarnio, Design Forum Finland, Helsinki
2009 Kaj Franck Design Prize exhibition, TR1, Tampere
2014 Eero Aarnio Life in Design, AXIS Gallery, Tokyo, and Design Museum de sign de, Osaka
2016 Eero Aarnio, Design Museum, Helsinki
2017 Eero Aarnio, Nationalmuseum Design, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm
2017 Eero Aarnio, Vandalorum, Värnamo
Group exhibitions
1961 Rattan Stools, Asko Oy, Helsinki
1964 7+7 Arkitekter, Stockholm
1964 XIV Triennale, Milan
1966 Eurodomus, Genoa — and Milan, 1970
1968 Fiberglass Furniture, Asko Oy, Helsinki
1970 Plastic as Plastic, New York
1979 Design aus Finnland, Asko GmbH, Cologne
1991 Masters of Modern Design, IBM Gallery, New York
2005 Plastic Fantastic, Trapholt, Denmark
2015 Pop Art Design, EMMA, Espoo
2015 Golden Generations: Modernism in Finnish Architecture and Design, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
2017 Finnish Design 2017, Fukuoka City Museum
Public collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York · Victoria and Albert Museum, London · Design Museum, Helsinki · Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein · Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris · Musée des arts décoratifs de Montréal · Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam · Die Neue Sammlung, Munich · Galerie für Avantgarde Kunst, Cologne · Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig · Kunsthal Rotterdam · Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof · Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg · Brooklyn Museum, New York · Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, Musée du Château Dufresne, Montréal · Los Angeles County Museum of Art · Toledo Museum of Art · Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City · Baltimore Museum of Art · Bauhaus Museum, Sydney · San Francisco Museum of Modern Art · Veletržní Palace, Prague
Books
That’s It. Vestígio, Consultores de Design, Portugal, 2001
Eero Aarnio. Fang Hai. China Architecture & Building Press, 2002
Assume a Round Chair — Eero Aarnio and the 60’s. Kunsthalle Helsinki and University of Art and Design, Helsinki, 2003
Eero Aarnio. Fang Hai. Southeast University Press, China, 2003
Eero Aarnio, Kaj Franck Design Prize. Design Forum Finland, 2008
I Protagonisti del Design: Eero Aarnio. Hachette, Italy, 2011
A = 4πr² Eero Aarnio. Design Forum Finland, 2014
Eero Aarnio — Värin ja ilon muotoilija. WSOY, Finland, 2016