Bruno Mathsson (13 January 1907 – 17 August 1988) was a Swedish architect and furniture designer whose ideas aligned with functionalism,
modernism, as well as the Swedish crafts tradition.[1]
Biography
Bruno Mathsson in 1950
Mathsson was raised in the town of
Värnamo in the
Småland region of
Sweden, the son of a master cabinet maker.[2] After a short time of education in school, he started to work in his father's gallery. He soon found a great interest in furniture and especially chairs, their function and design. In the 1920s and 30s he developed a techniques for building
bentwood chairs with hemp webbing. The first model, called the Grasshopper, was used at Värnamo Hospital in 1931.[3]
Edgar Kaufmann Jr., director of the Industrial Design Department at the
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), collected Mathsson's chairs and included them in several exhibitions in the 1940s.[4] Kaufmann considered Mathsson's importance in furniture design on par with that of
Alvar Aalto.[5] Kaufmann and his family also had a Mathsson chair at their house
Fallingwater.[6]
Mathsson was also an accomplished architect; he completed about 100 structures in the 1940s and 50s.[7] He was the first architect in Sweden to build all-glass structures with heated floors. His furniture showroom in Värnamo (1950) was a significant example; it is well-preserved and open to the public today. For his glass houses, he developed double- and triple-pane insulated glass units called "Bruno-Pane".[8]
He traveled extensively in the United States and was strongly influenced by the solar houses of
George Fred Keck. Mathsson's architecture was also influenced by a visit to the
Eames House by
Charles and Ray Eames in March 1949 just as it was being completed.[1]
Works
Mathsson's Eva and Mina chairs
Furniture
Grasshopper (1931)
Mimat (1932)
Pernilla (1934)
The Eva Chair (1935)
Folding table (1935)
Paris Daybed (1937)
Swivel chair (1939-1940)
Pernilla Lounge
Jetson Chair
Super-Ellipse™ table series, with Piet Hein (1966)
^
abWidman, Dag; Winter, Karin; Stritzler-Levine, Nina (2006). Bruno Mathsson: architect and designer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
ISBN9780300121919.
^Christiansson, Carl E. (1966). "Bruno Mathsson: Furniture/Structures/Ideas". Design Quarterly. 65 (65): 1–2, 5–31.
doi:
10.2307/4047313.
JSTOR4047313.
^Kiss, Bernadett; Neij, Lena (2011). "The importance of learning when supporting emergent technologies for energy efficiency: A case study on policy intervention for learning for the development of energy efficient windows in Sweden". Energy Policy. 39 (10): 6514–6524.
doi:
10.1016/j.enpol.2011.07.053.