Since Artek’s founding in 1935, some eight
million Aalto stools have been sold worldwide.
As part of its 2nd Cycle project, the company
has given about 2,000 vintage pieces—bought
from flea markets, schools, and homes—a new
lease on life by reintroducing them to the
market. “Artek products are turning to art/
vintage pieces, and their value is increasing
the older they get,” Mirkku Kullberg says.
a wood-plastic composite made from recycled sticky labels,
which he developed with UPM, the Finnish forest-products
group. “The process we had with Shigeru is the way we want
to work: to have a close connection between architecture
and material research,” she says.
She points out several projects that she says illustrate
the company’s “radicalism”: packaging that argues against
overconsumption with the tagline “One Chair Is Enough”;
a film with Enzo Mari, who is associated with the antidesign
movement; and, replacing an anniversary party, an international symposium about interdisciplinary thinking with
speakers like the Pritzker winner Peter Zumthor (about
whom there are rumors of a possible collaboration with
Artek), the artist Tobias Rehberger, and the philosopher
David Kleinberg-Levin.
Perhaps Artek’s most unusual undertaking is a project
called 2nd Cycle. The company collects vintage furniture
from flea markets, schools, and people’s homes, then tags,
labels, and reintroduces it to the retail market. “It’s the idea
of an Artek chair bought today becoming the second cycle of
tomorrow,” Kullberg says. “It can be the one and only chair
you need.”
At this year’s Milan furniture fair, Artek’s focus was on
lighting, with designs from the archive—many unfamiliar
outside of Finland—being brought back into production in
advance of an eventual U.S. launch. “Aalto’s lighting plays
with different shapes of shading to get different reflections,”
explains Ville Kokkonen, Artek’s design director. “He mas-
tered the mix of natural and artificial light in spaces, with
scale, shape, and the positioning of fixed and unfixed settings.”
Plans are also forming for the relaunch of Artek fabrics. The
biggest push this month at ICFF will be the North American
launch of Ilmari Tapiovaara’s furniture collection. (The
company owns the design rights to the work of Tapiovaara,
one of Finland’s best-known modernist interior designers,
who died in 1999.)
Lamp A805
“The simple geometric shapes of
the Aalto classics transform into
more abstract form when color is
added,” says Kokkonen. “The new
gray is a clear middle gray that has
become the standard gray for us.
This red is close to the old red
laminates that were on the Artek
stools in late thirties.” The company is working on applying
coatings that have different
textures and technical properties
and can be chemically responsive,
antibacterial, and antistatic.
