Arne Jacobsen Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971) was a Danish architect and designer and one of the central figures of Scandinavian modernism. He designed buildings, furniture, lighting, cutlery and textiles, often for the same project, as at the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, where he created everything from the tower to the Egg and Swan chairs. His Ant and Series 7 chairs remain among the most widely produced designs of the twentieth century.

Copenhagen and the Royal Academy

Jacobsen was born in Copenhagen in 1902. He first hoped to be a painter but trained as a mason and then studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1927. While still a student he won a silver medal at the 1925 Paris Exhibition for a chair design, and in 1929, with Flemming Lassen, he won a competition for the House of the Future.

Bellavista, Aarhus and wartime exile

In the 1930s Jacobsen built the Bellavista housing estate, the Bellevue Theatre and the Bellevue Beach facilities in Klampenborg, north of Copenhagen, as well as his summer house at Gudmindrup Lyng (1937). With Erik Møller he designed Aarhus City Hall (1941). In 1943, under the German occupation, he fled to Sweden, where he worked mainly on textiles and wallpapers.

Søholm, Munkegaard and the chairs

After the war he built the Søholm row houses in Klampenborg (1950), where he lived, and the Munkegaard School in Gentofte (1957). For the furniture maker Fritz Hansen he designed the Ant chair (1952) and the Series 7 chair (1955), made of moulded plywood on thin steel legs, which became some of the most successful chairs ever produced.

The SAS Royal Hotel and Oxford

The SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen (1960) was a complete work of design, from the curtain wall tower to the Egg and Swan chairs, the AJ lamp and the cutlery later used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He went on to design St Catherine’s College in Oxford (1966) and the National Bank of Denmark, completed after his death in Copenhagen in 1971.