Eero Aarnio
Eero Aarnio, a 'Studio armchair' for 'Arto Nyberg show'.
Light fabric upholstery. Base made of plastic. Width 85 cm, seat height 45 cm, total height approximately 80 cm.
Minor wear due to age and use.
Provenance
Design Eero Aarnio Showroom.
More information
Eero Aarnio was a guest on Arto Nyberg’s interview show on Yle and said, “What a bad sofa you have.”
Nyberg replied, “Then draw a better one.”
A few days later, Eero returned to the studio with sketches and presented a better design. Nyberg and the production team got excited, and after the summer break, the new chairs appeared on the show.
That’s why the chair was named Studio.
Only a small number of chairs were made, and this is one of three that came to the Design Eero Aarnio Showroom (black, red, and this white one).
Designer
The legendary Finnish designer, Professor Eero Aarnio was one of the first to create furniture in fiberglass and plastic; materials that offer virtually unlimited possibilities to create new
shapes and colours. With his “Ball Chair”, presented at the international furniture fair in Cologne in 1966, Aarnio revolutionized furniture design and the innovative easy chair marked his final career breakthrough internationally. Eero Aarnio’s design is sculptural but at the same time playful, with frequent allusions to 1960’s pop culture. Aarnio’s designs were based on fundamental geometrical elements such as the sphere and the ellipse, and he transformed these into seat furniture. Aarnio’s creed was that “a chair is a seat but a seat doesn’t have to look like a chair”. The pieces quickly became hugely popular with a broad international demand and today Eero Aarnio is considered one of the greatest contemporary designers worldwide. With their futuristic shapes and materials Aarnio’s creations became symbols of the Space Age - a notion the designer himself has always shunned. “Space didn’t inspire me at all, I just wanted to create a round chair, I simply wanted to find a new shape”, Aarnio has stated in numerous interviews. During his career Eero Aarnio has been awarded numerous prizes, amongst them the International Design Award
of the American Institute of Interior Designers in 1968, the Italian Compasso d’Oro prize in 2008, the Kaj Franck Design Prize in 2008 and the Pro Finlandia Award in 2010.