Werner Penton ( February 13, 1926 - September 5, 1998 ) - Danish designer and architect.
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Verner Panton | |
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Date of Birth | |
Place of Birth | Denmark , Gamtoft |
Date of death | |
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Works and achievements | |
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Architectural style | modern |
Content
Biography
Verner Panton was born on February 13, 1926 in Gamtoft, Denmark . After graduating from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he worked at the architectural office of Arne Jacobson . There he began to engage in furniture design, and then opened his own studio in 1955 .
Creativity
Verner Panton is considered a revolutionary in furniture design. He experimented with materials such as glass , plastic , steel and polypropylene and was one of the first to consider individual elements of the interior as connected by a common space .
Panton experimented a lot and argued that furniture should not necessarily have a traditional form . His famous chair designs - Tivoli, Bachelor and Cone - were once considered the most unusual chairs in the world. Werner believed that chairs should be not only comfortable, but also interesting . The most famous designer chair - Panton Chair was made from a single piece of molded plastic [5] . The design of the chair was so unusual that production began only in 1967 by the German company Herman Miller & Fehibaum and is still produced by Vitra. In addition to chairs, the designer came up with more than 25 different forms for lamps.
Panton also designed textiles and interiors , creating interiors for the publishing houses Spiegel and Gruner & Jahr in Hamburg , as well as for the Astoria Hotel in Trondheim.
Style
Verner Panton has never been a designer of the finished form, so all of his development remains relevant to this day, and some are still considered as experimental models. Working with materials such as plexiglass, fiberglass, plywood, plastic, glass, steel, foam rubber , polypropylene, he created hitherto unseen psychedelic interiors. Panton did not seek to invent individual, even if original objects, instead he tried to create an atmosphere. Each object acted as an element of the living environment, fitting into the overall concept and conveying the right mood. The designer called this the "interactive home landscape." Panton’s business card can rightfully be called the installation “Fantastic Landscape” in the wavy room Visiona II invented by him in 1970 (in Cologne, Germany). This surreal interior, where the walls, floor, ceiling and furniture are a single organism, has become a real emblem of the 60s.
Panton argued that color is more important than form, and his goal was to teach people who surround themselves with traditional gray-beige colors to use imagination in interior design.
Working with a bright, clear color, most often the opposite of that which would be natural for a particular object, he proposed a new, revolutionary approach to the design of the premises.
But, despite his passion for color, he created a huge number of objects that entered the history of design precisely because of its revolutionary form. Among such things is the famous Panton Chair (1960), a chair made from a single piece of molded plastic. For seven years, Panton was looking for a factory, which will undertake to make this model, and at the same time continued to improve it. Originally manufactured by Fritz Hansen, the chair began to be produced in 1967 by Herman Miller & Fehlbaum. Since 1999 and today it has been produced by Vitra. Panton Chair made his debut in 1967 on the cover of Mobilia magazine and received an AID award in 1968.
The shape of the chair, which is a curve that does not have any frame, was designed to give the body soft support, which is exactly what was done - in various color variations.
“Sitting on a chair should be fun and interesting, like in a game,” Panton thought. He developed this idea further, creating hanging chairs that violate the principle of gravity, flower chairs, inflatable chairs and wire-frame chairs. The flight of the designer’s imagination did not hold back, it seemed, with nothing, and modern materials allowed him to implement his most daring projects.
Verner Panton was born in the small town of Gamtoft on the Danish island of Funen. From childhood, he sought to become an artist, but did not show great talent in drawing. Panton studied at a technical college in Odense as a civil engineer. After completing college, Panton moved to Copenhagen in 1947 and began studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts.
Familiarity with Paul Henningsen, a lighting designer known for his bold, clear aesthetic principles, allowed Panton to begin experiments with furniture design. (In 1950, Panton married Henningsen's daughter Tuve Kemp, but soon divorced). He is also friends with artisan designer Hans Wegner, famous for modernizing classic Danish teak chairs. Thanks to him, Panton showed a passion for experiments with plastic and anthropogenic materials to create a dynamic color solution in geometric forms of pop art.
Equally important was the training and cooperation of Verner Panton with Arne Jacobsen from 1950 to 1952. In the studio, Panton was not on the best account, as he devoted most of his time to his own projects.
Nevertheless, it is Panton who is directly involved in the work on the project of the Ant chair (Ant), which made Arne Jacobsen a world-renowned industrial designer. In fact, Arne Jacobsen and Werner Panton realized the dream of modernism - to create a chair for daily use, suitable for mass production and ergonomic for sitting. The possibility of its implementation appeared only with the introduction of new industrial technologies. Ant became the first industrially manufactured chair in which the back and the seat were formed as a whole. Jacobsen tried to use the smallest amount of material during its creation and further production. Perhaps, therefore, Ant had three legs of bent tubes, and only his later modification - Model number 7 - four. The influence of Arne Jacobsen on Panton's work in the field of non-standard use of materials and striving for ergonomics is obvious. Later, Werner Panton “wives” the teacher, making a bright, light, ergonomic and dynamic chair PantoSwing-2K - with two legs.
By purchasing a second-hand Volkswagen on commission from his first orders, Panton retooled him for a mobile drawing workshop and began a trip to Europe, which helped him to conclude contracts with manufacturers. In 1955, Fritz Hansen began manufacturing Bachelor and Tivoli chairs made from tubular steel, fabric and plastic.
His work as an architect at the Applied Arts Exhibition at the Fredericia Furniture Fair in 1958 became the harbinger of his unconventional approach to design principles. He demonstrated furniture suspended from the ceiling, which caused shock both to the organizers and to the visitors of the exhibition. Chairs Cone ("Cone") and Heart ("Heart"), created in the same year, marked the beginning of his experiments with a non-standard form of the chair. These chairs did not have a separate back or legs, they resembled a cylinder with a dent, designed to sit. Since his chairs rarely had legs, critics decided to call his creations simply "seats."
One of the best projects implemented by Panton in furniture design is the Cone Chair, designed by him for the redesign of the restaurant at the Kenigen on Funen hotel (Denmark). According to Verner Panton, the idea arose during a preliminary sketch on the paper of a new chair. Continuing the line of the backrest in a straight line, until it touched the leg, the pedestal located on the floor, he got a completely new idea in shaping the chairs. In other words, simply destroyed the usual idea of the formation of a chair. An inverted cone, Cone was so futuristic and shocking for its time that it was exhibited once in the shop window of its manufacturer in New York that led to the need to call the police: to restore the traffic opposite the showroom. This chair went into production thanks to Percy von Halling-Koch, who was present at the opening of the restaurant and invited the designer to produce and market his furniture. Especially for this, he founded Plus - linje as an addition to his thriving textile company Uniko.
A further development of the design of the Cone Chair was the Wire Cone Chair constructed of metal wire. Another experiment for the Plus - linje collection was the creation of a chair made of transparent plexiglass and an attempt to create a chair made of thin plastic with the possibility of filling it with air. Before Panton, only a few designers worked with transparent materials, in particular Jean Prüwe and Jacques Andre, with their collection of 1936 garden chairs.
When Panton presented an inflatable plastic chair at a furniture exhibition in 1960, he received orders for several thousand copies, but not one of the chairs was delivered to the customer: the air in the new chairs simply did not linger for a long time. The development of technology at the time did not resolve this problem.
Only a few years later, other designers began to work on furniture made of inflatable plastic.
Blow from Carla Scolari, Paolo Lomazzi, Jonathan De Paz and Donato D'Urbino was already produced with the possibility of long-term use of furniture based on the principle of blow up.
In the late 60s and early 70s Panton experimented with the use of fabric in the interior. He believed that the furniture should interact with each other, as "a kind of landscape that refuses to be only functional." During this period, a number of objects were created that reflect the designer’s philosophy.
Panton’s other significant contribution to mid-century design is his continuous experiments with light. The Fun series, the Globe pendant lamps and various chandeliers marked the beginning of a new approach to lighting. From 1955 to 1998, Panton designed the design of more than 25 lamps. Lighting in the performance of Panton ceased to be a necessity and became an integral part of the design of the premises, forcing the interior to play in a new way.
It is noteworthy that, following Paul Hennigen, Panton uses the original technique in working with light: he makes the lamp only a source of light, hiding it from prying eyes and leaving it possible to regulate the power and direction of light. Since 1959, his lamps are launched in industrial production (lamp "Topan").
But the most remarkable lamp lamp ever invented by the designer, Shell Lamp, was created in 1964 and consisted of a huge number of circles cut from shells. This is a rare example of using Panton natural materials. In most of his lamps, the main role was assigned to metal, plastic, color, and rounded forms.
In the mid-seventies, Panton became interested in creating private interiors. Piece, individual work allowed the designer to once again destroy the canons created by him.
In the cynical post-Vietnamese era of the 70s, Verner Panton gradually lost his place in the industrial design scene. The politicized aesthetics and designs of Alessandro Medini and Gaetano Pesce seemed more important than Panton’s playful optimistic style. While other designers of his generation, in particular Ettore Sattsass, were accepted and actively worked with young colleagues, Werner Panton was increasingly isolated in his internal Swiss emigration.
Books do not burn, and brilliant things, too, and this is confirmed by the triumphant ascent to the scene of world design in the nineties. Already forgotten, written off as the legends of the past century, Panton easily returns the withered, it was the laurels of the great artist and again finds recognition, especially among young people.
The interiors, furniture, lighting and objects developed by Werner Panton remain to this day one of the most advanced intellectual experiments in design. He seemed to have the gift of foresight - so unmistakably he predetermined the tendencies that later became the most popular. He had a great influence on the artists and designers who worked from the 60s to the present day, and his projects stored in archives are likely to be taken for a long time as a basis in many areas of modern design.
Unlike other Danish designers, he had a revolutionary, not an evolutionary view of things, and during his life he created many innovative, risky and playful things. To create them, the most modern technologies were required, which reflected his life optimism. [6]
Works
- 1960: Moon Lamp - one of the first Panton lamps.
- 1967: Panton Chair - a chair made of one piece of molded plastic.
- 1969: Pantower
- 1970: Visiona II
- 1995: PantoSeries - the first school chairs, created specifically for children, taking into account their physique.
- Bayer exposition ships Visiona O + II, Köln, 1968, 1970 → VISIONA II Video (Laufzeit 2:08 Min)
Awards and prizes
- International Design Award, USA , 1963, 1968, 1981
- Rosenthal AG Studio Preis, 1966
- Poul Henningsen-Preis, 1967
- Eurodomus 2, Italy , 1968
- Medal of Austrian Building Center, Austria , 1968
- Bundespreis "Gute Form", Germany , 1972, 1986
- Møbelprisen, Denmark , 1978
- Deutsche Auswahl, Germany , 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986
- Color Prize, Denmark , 1986
- Danish Design Council Annual Award, Denmark , 1991
- IF-Preis, Japan , 1992
- Norwegian Design Award, Norway , 1992
- Bedre Prize, Denmark , 1998
Notes
- 2016 artist list of the National Museum of Sweden - 2016.
- ↑ 1 2 BNF ID : 2011 open data platform .
- ↑ 1 2 Verner Panton
- ↑ 1 2 Verner Panton
- ↑ Andrei Kupetz, Ein Material in Form gebracht , Kunststoffe 5/2010, p. 90-94
- ↑ Charlotte and Peter Fill, Design des 20. Jahrhunderts, Cologne, 2000