Mirkku Kullberg is convinced that maintaining
Artek’s heritage is crucial to its reinvention:
the company has made furniture in the
same factory (HKT Korhonen), using wood
from the same forest, for 75 years.
66 chair
Pendant lamp A331
Artek’s presence in the United States dates back to 1937,
when Harmon H. Goldstone, a young architect who had
visited Aalto one year earlier, formed a company with Wallace
Harrison and Lawrence Rockefeller to import the Finnish
designer’s furniture. During the early 1940s, Clifford N.
Pascoe set up a New York showroom and a manufacturing
facility in Wisconsin. A few pioneering retailers—mainly
architects and designers, such as Louisa Conrad and Sarah
Pillsbury, in Boston; Thomas Church, in San Francisco; and
Kitty Baldwin and Jody Kingrey, in Chicago—began selling
pieces by Aalto and other modernists. During the 1950s,
Hans Lindblom, a Swedish architect, added the Artek line
to his New York store, Scandinavian Design, which continues to carry Aalto’s work today.
Artek began to remake itself about six years ago, and
Kullberg knew that instead of replicating company history,
she wanted to create a contemporary response to it. “If
something has been around for seventy-five years, there must
be something solid about it,” she says. The biggest difference
from the company’s early years is that it no longer has an
intimate connection to an architectural practice. “The core
of the company was the architecture and development by
Aalto himself,” Kullberg says. Even so, she’s convinced that
maintaining Artek’s heritage is crucial to its reinvention:
the company has made furniture in the same factory (HKT
Korhonen), using wood from the same forest, for 75 years.
“Still, product development must now be the heart of the oper-
ations,” she says. “We need to embrace radicalism—new ideas,
new technologies—and not choose the path of consensus.”
Kullberg sees the company’s collaboration with Shigeru
Ban in 2007 as a turning point in the transition. Ban created
a temporary pavilion for Artek and a chair system using
