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Forest Industry:
AALTO STOOL STANDS FOR 70 YEARS
Alvar Aalto once threw one of his designs a stool –
along the floor. Convinced of the impact that it would make,
he exclaimed: “This will sell in its thousands!”.
Here he was mistaken: 70 years later more than 1.5 million
Aalto stools have been sold around the world.
The story begins in the 1930s, when the young Alvar carried
out design tests on a metal pipe. He soon moved, however,
to working on wood, and the familiar Finnish birch quickly
proved to be an excellent material. Aalto learnt to process
the wood and developed a quite new method for bending it:
he noticed that wood can be bent more easily if it is first
laminated with thin layers of plywood. At the same time Aalto
became the creator of an invention that was one of the most
revolutionary and imitated in furniture design.
The ingenious technique was applied for the first time in
the L leg of the Aalto stool. The stool was displayed at Fortnum
and Mason’s in London and the seat, which can be stacked,
soon became the model for functional and minimalist furniture
design.
Aalto’s three-legged stool reached its seventieth year
in 2003. In honour of this Artek brought out a collector’s
item and celebratory version of the stool in which the seat
part is made of curly birch.
(Source: Alvar Aalto, Riihitie House 1935-36, museum lecturer
Teija Isohauta, Alvar Aalto Museum)
Published 2004
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