ARNE JACOBSEN
Tobias Faber
Tobias Faber: ARNE JACOBSEN. Milano: Edizioni di Communita 1964. First edition. Text in Italian. Square quarto. Oatmeal cloth titled in red. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 176 [xv] pp. 300 black and white illustrations. Textblock faintly sunned to edges. Jacket lightly rubbed with mild wear to top edge, including one short, closed tear and a spine chip. Textblock mildly and uniformly sunned to edges, but a very good or better copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
A beautifully printed and preserved near-fine hardcover book in a near-fine dustjacket with minor shelf wear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
9 x 10.25 hardcover book with 192 pages and 300 photographs, sketches, and plans. Printed in Germany on glossy stock with an unswerving attention to detail and excellence. Arne Jacobsen's chairs—the Ant, the Swan, and the Egg--are too well known and perhaps shadows his other myriad accomplishments including municipal buildings, town halls, theatres, private homes, apartment buildings, schools, factories, office buildings, and landscape design. Along with furniture design, his decorative arts work included wallpaper, utensil, and textile design.
- Single-Family Houses
- Housing Estates and Blocks of Flats
- Schools and Sports Buildings
- Town Halls
- Factories, Office Buildings, Hotel
- Industrial Design
- Landscaping
"The fundamental factor is proportion. Proportion is precisely what makes the old Greek temples beautiful . . . And when we look at some of the most admired buildings of the Renaissance or the Baroque, we notice that they are all well-proportioned. That is the essential thing." –Arne Jacobsen
Arne Jacobsen (1902 – 1971) began training as a mason before studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen where he won a silver medal for a chair that was then exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Art Decoratifs in Paris. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobsen embraced a functionalist approach from the outset. He was among the first to introduce modernist ideas to Denmark and create industrial furniture that built upon on its craft-based design heritage.
First among Jacobsen's important architectural commissions was the Bellavista housing project, Copenhagen (1930-1934). Best known and most fully integrated works, are the SAS Air Terminal and the Royal Hotel Copenhagen for which Jacobsen designed every detail from sculptural furnishings such as his elegant Swan and Egg chairs (1957-1958) to textiles, lighting, ashtrays and cutlery.
During the 1960's, Jacobsen's most important work was a unified architectural and interior design scheme for St. Catherine's College, Oxford, which, like his earlier work for the Royal Hotel, involved the design of site-specific furniture. Jacobsen's work remains appealing and fresh today, combining free-form sculptural shapes with the traditional attributes of Scandinavian design, material and structural integrity.