Finn Juhl, Hans J. Wegner, Arne Jacobsen, Poul Henningsen, Verner Panton: there are many Danes in the pantheon of twentieth-century design. One of them, perhaps the most refined of all – and still very modern today – is Poul Kjærholm, whose lounge chair, which Fritz Hansen is launching soon, remained unreleased for seventy years. Its story deserves to be told.
Kjærholm (1929-1980) studied cabinetmaking at Danmarks Designskole, where he was a favourite student of Hans J. Wegner. But his material of choice was steel, which he used masterfully throughout his career, combining it with leather or wicker to create linear furniture that was a precursor to minimalism.
In the early 1950s, he was commissioned by a large corporation to design two sets of seating – one for the canteen, the other for the reception area. At that moment in history, so many great designers were grappling with plywood and its possibilities. Kjærholm did it in his own way, creating a shell with a slit running the length of it to create a maximally ergonomic form with minimal manufacturing effort. And this slit, like in Lucio Fontana’s paintings, becomes a trademark.
The design was not approved by the client, and there is an anecdote about this. The owner of the company was a burly man and he sat on the prototype wearing a fur coat (it was winter). The fur coat got stuck and it took two people to help him untangle it. “I will never sit in that chair, and neither will any of my employees,” was the reaction. End of story.
A second was made in 2006 for the exhibition Poul Kjærholm – Furniture Architect at the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen. “We were asked to make it,” says Christian Andresen, Art Director at Fritz Hansn, “and it was its first ‘public release’. Based on this 2006 prototype and discussions with Kjærholm’s children, Thomas and Krestine, we brought PK23 to life.
“The Eames, Eero Saarinen and Jacobsen had made one- or two-piece freeform chairs, but no one had thought of splitting the plywood, so it was a radical idea,” Andresen continues. “We have many sketches of Kjærholm trying different solutions, more like the Eames, with big brackets, big circles, aluminum strips. It was Poul’s wife Hanne who collected all the original sketches and sat down with Fritz Hansen in the early 2000s for the Louisiana exhibition. They posed the question, “What would Kjærholm do if he were here?” Hanne, who was an architect, translated her husband’s ideas into the product exhibited in 2006. By turning that prototype into a production piece, we stayed true to those ideas.
The PK23 will be available in four finishes: oak or walnut plywood with brushed stainless steel legs, black ash with stainless steel legs, or black powder-coated. These will be joined in early 2025 by a version with a fabric-covered shell and light upholstery.
