The Apple-approved furniture brand Artek turns 80 this month. MR PORTER celebrates its pioneering founder.

Eighty years ago, four Finnish contemporaries founded a new furniture company in Helsinki. They called it “Artek” – a portmanteau of “art” and “technology”. The Artek team believed that both were forces for good, if used in the right way. And their mission statement, written in 1935, was no less ambitious, setting out a plan not just for innovative furniture and home products, but collaborations, publications and exhibitions.

Artek’s founders contributed different skills to the effort. Ms Maire Gullichsen was a collector and patron. Mr Nils-Gustav Hahl was an art historian. But the driving force behind the company was always the visionary design work of Mr Alvar Aalto who, alongside his wife Ms Aino Aalto (also a founding designer), used Artek to bring his own brand of humane modernism into the lives and homes of people the world over. Less industrial than the work of his friends at the Bauhaus, Mr Aalto’s warm, woody modernism has come to define a Nordic-but-international, friendly, fuss-free functionality.

From the beginning, Mr Aalto and his cofounders wanted to use Artek to “make the world a better place”, says Ms Marianne Goebl, Artek’s managing director. In many ways, they have made good on that promise, if not perhaps in the ways that they imagined. Today, you can see Mr Aalto’s designs and “approximations” (including Stool 60, Armchairs 41 and 400 and Tea Trolley 901) everywhere from Apple stores to Ikea.

Indeed Ms Goebl refers to Mr Aalto’s designs, and those of other Artek designers, as “old friends”. Emphasising the longevity and fashion-resistant practicality of Aalto’s work, in 2007 Artek launched what it called 2nd Cycle, reselling wonderfully worn vintage Artek pieces. “Artek products know what they are, but they don’t shout,” says Ms Goebl. “They leave you alone, but are there to help if you need them. There is a poetic simplicity to them.”

Mr Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland, in 1898 and opened his first architectural office in 1922. His early buildings mixed classical elements with the local vernacular: plain, modest buildings, often in wood – a style tagged Nordic Classicism. But he soon embraced the strict white boxes of the International style, having befriended the likes of Bauhaus professor Mr László Moholy-Nagy, architect Le Corbusier and artists Mr Alexander Calder and Mr Fernand Léger in the 1920s.

His breakthrough project was the (recently restored) Viipuri Library in Vyborg, Russia. Mr Aalto submitted his first designs in 1927, but it would be eight years until the building was completed. That gave him time to revise the drafts many times over – designing other buildings in the interim – and in those revisions he arrived at the definitive Aalto style.

His ideas were on a more human scale – more cocooning and comforting – and extended to the furniture he created to fill the space, which included a chair resting on curved legs made from steam-bent birch. Designed in 1935, Chair 69 was to become one of Artek’s earliest products. Its L-shaped leg was a new invention, inspired by the tubular steel furniture of the Bauhaus, but relying on the natural strength and pliability of wood.

Artek put into production many of Mr Aalto’s existing designs, which were often created for specific buildings – the now-iconic Armchair 41 was originally designed for Finland’s Paimio Sanatorium. But it also led him to new creations, such as his “Tank” armchair (Armchair 400) designed in 1936: a cantilevered design suspended by flexible curved wooden legs, commissioned by that year’s Milan Triennale.

While Mr Aalto was creating a new vernacular for both public and domestic spaces, he was also defining the design culture of a new nation: Finland, home to most of his best-known buildings. “Finland was only formed in 1917, so when Artek came along in 1935, it was really a very young state,” says Ms Goebl. “But Aalto also designed many of its new public buildings and institutions. He literally helped shape the nation.”

In 1939, Mr Aalto designed the Finnish Pavilion in New York for the World’s Fair. It was praised as a “work of genius” by no less than esteemed architect Mr Frank Lloyd Wright. He then went on to design what is now the Helsinki University of Technology, as well as The House of Culture, the National Pensions Institute and the monumental Finlandia Hall in the capital.

If Mr Aalto’s work had a pronounced effect on Finland, it also made its way proudly into the world beyond. Thanks to the simplicity and humanity of his furniture designs, they’ve been in style since the 1930s. Ms Goebl notes how Mr Aalto managed to create what feels like an infinite variety out of a few components. “He only uses three different legs, but you never look at different pieces and say, ‘Well, that has the same legs as that one.” It’s an economy and ethos that has exerted an irresistible appeal, whatever the decade.

All images © Artek (artek.fi)