Just after the end of the Second World War, the global situation was fairly stable and remained that way until the mid-1970s. Notwithstanding the Cold War rhetoric, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had a tacit understanding that the Cold War should be waged as a ‘cold peace’. During ‘the American Century’ that now unfolded with unprecedented power in economics, politics, consumer practices and culture, new American design gained a central position on the global design map, on a par with Italian and Scandinavian design. This was especially the case within the new organic modernist furniture design and industrial product design.

The United States caught the eye

Like never before, Danish design also looked to the United States. This transatlantic outlook brought in new commercial, aesthetic and methodological perspectives. Also, not least, exports to the American market boosted Danish Modern furniture expression, the flowing lines of organic modernism became a shared paradigm, the plastic adventure found a dynamic Danish format, and the term ‘design’ was increasingly embraced in the Danish language. In 1949, the first Danish studio specializing in industrial design was founded when the Swedish ‘design prince’ Sigvard Bernadotte and the Danish architect Acton Bjørn established their partnership in Copenhagen (1949–64). Modelled on the American concept of ‘consultant design’ – in contrast to the British ‘in-house’ model – this initiative was a groundbreaking innovation in Danish and Scandinavian industrial design practice.

The new studio developed an all-encompassing field of activities, giving existing products a ‘facelift’ or acting as consultants to companies wishing to create new products through innovative development and design processes: office equipment, household utensils in plastic, domestic appliances, furniture, radio and TV sets, graphic design and packaging, industrial textiles, agricultural machinery and so forth.

One product that rose to iconic fame was the celebrated Margrethe bowl for kitchen use, a well-shaped item in melamine that has remained in production at Rosti ever since the bowls were first launched, in pastel colours, in 1954. The prolific studio’s countless product designs also include the Morsø cooking pots, the ubiquitous RAV radiator thermostat from Danfoss (1964) and Bang & Olufsen’s transistor radio Beolit 500 (1965).

For Bjørn and Bernadotte, stays and travels in the United States had a catalytic effect. Both men had an early exposure to the leading American industrial design studios through personal contacts with the most prominent American designers of the time, including Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague and, not least, Henry Dreyfuss. Before meeting Bernadotte, Acton Bjørn had been to Seattle, Washington, on behalf of SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) to inspect SAS’s newly purchased Douglas aircraft and make sure that their outfitting and graphic design matched the design he had personally been involved in shaping.

Foreign designers working at Bernadotte & Bjørn

Bjørn and Bernadotte considered the traditional courses in architectural drawing at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen (now Royal Danish Academy – Architecture) inadequate, overly abstract, diagrammatic or too cryptic for the requirements and phases of industrial design processes. This critical view is an important part of the explanation of the many foreign designers employed at the studio over the years – an unusually high ratio for Denmark at the time.

Having employees from other countries not only stimulated the international outlook in the working processes and environment. With educational backgrounds from, mainly, the United States and Britain, unlike Danish designers at the time, they were familiar with the artistic methods of life-like perspective drawing – the vital visualization that Bjørn and Bernadotte considered an essential professional skill, both internally at the studio and in external communication.

These so-called renderings were indispensable: they served not only as a clarifying focus point for the individual designer and the studio but also as a vehicle of presentation and a basis for dialogue with the client, the leadership of the company that had commissioned the design and the company’s technical staff that would typically prepare the construction drawings. Tangible models on a 1:1 scale, created by model maker Alf Rimer in wood, acrylic or other materials, were also used to facilitate the clarifying discussion among everyone involved in the project.

Americanization of the design process and academic contempt

These innovations enabled a methodological approach that implied a full or partial dismissal of traditional architectural sketching, as it was still taught at the Academy in Copenhagen. The Academy, in turn, had nothing but contempt for the new, less idealistic and much more practical, visual and communicative approach embraced by Bernadotte and Bjørn and the studio staff, in line with the American practice. By employing the less geographically settled foreign designers, the studio also had the benefit of a workforce that was more easily scaled and modified to match the nature and scope of current projects. Nevertheless, several of the foreign designers did leave a long-term imprint on the design studio’s activities and developments, and after the Danish-Swedish duo eventually split up, Acton Bjørn continued this international line.

Like the physical presentation models, the projected ‘evocations’ of future products on paper clearly demonstrate the designers’ heightened awareness of the products’ visual and material properties and their overall appearance. In these media, technological and constructive aspects seem almost absent from the representation, magically removed from the clean surfaces of object’s manifestation in the two dimensions of the sketch or the three dimensions of the presentation model. This lends prominence to the product’s sensory and symbolizing qualities, with an intense focus on the articulation of form, the brightness of colour and the character of materials in relation to our near and distant senses. The growth and maturation stages of the designer as a specialist of nonverbal communication can be observed in both sketches and presentation models.

The sensualizing technique of perspective drawings provides an almost photorealistic three-dimensional early impression of the product’s possible appearance, in whole or in part. From a time before computer graphics, the instruments were pencil, gouache and the modern felt-tipped pen. Sublimely dramatized by highlighting of edges, corner or surface, the product image emerged, life-like, from paper, cartridge paper or cardboard, with a suggestive and almost confectionery-like quality and plasticity. Not only on a white background but just as commonly and impactfully in white crayon and opaque colours on a coloured background or black cardboard.

In these illustrations, the persuasive and seductive effect is nothing short of brilliant, with much of the illusion stemming from the credible reproduction of the exterior’s interaction with light: the reflective white enamel of domestic appliances; the warm notes of the unique grain of lacquered wooden surfaces; the particular tactile qualities of a wrinkle or hammer finish; or the smooth, semi-matt or translucent character of plastic objects – in fact, even commonplace chrome-plating can appear irresistible. If sketches from the 1950s tended towards the delicate, soft and crisp, by the 1960s, the style was often more insistent. Among the employees, the Armenian designer Keith Kharabian – the ‘forgotten’ designer of the Carmen Curlers box (1963) – in particular represented this temperament in visual presentations of concept and form, whether the topic was transistor radios, office appliances or other product types entirely.

The names behind hundreds of renderings

In the thousands of renderings from Bernadotte & Bjørn, signature initials represent the employees behind the products, first among them Derek Dennis, Michael Thorne, Brian Fitzpatrick, Keith Karabian, Gerry Grimes and John Paine. Another excellent designer was the American Carl Olsen, who went on to become the director of styling at Citroën.

Naturally, the signatures also include Danish names, architecture students, trained architects and craftspeople at Bernadotte & Bjørn, primarily Rolf Andersen, Knud Allerup, Kirsten Andersen, Inger Exner, Rolf Grenov, Poul Hartmann, Ulla Meyer, Leif Olsen, Torben Pardorf, John Rimer and J. Weisdorf. Based on years-long employment at the studio, two obvious talents emerged: Jacob Jensen and Jan Trägårdh, both of whom later established trend-setting independent design firms. Jacob Jensen did so in 1958, after spending six months in the United States, where he worked first at Raymond Loewy’s studio and next at Latham Tyler Jensen’s, while Jan Trägårdh cofounded an independent studio with Rolf Andersen in 1962.

Two main approaches and the space in between: a retrospective look at the interwar years

During the 1930s, American Shaker furniture had a strong influence on the typological work in Klint’s school of furniture design, but during the interwar years, academic traditionalism was dominated by an interest in English furniture and applied art. Concurrently, Poul Henningsen’s and Edvard Heiberg’s culturally critical approach, which focused on modern functional typologies, also did not have an American orientation. Their international outlook was primarily – but not uncritically – directed at the European avant-garde: Germany, with the Bauhaus, and France, with Le Corbusier, but also included Russian constructivism.

Before the emergence of these two wings, and in between them, the horizon nevertheless broadened to include significant transatlantic impulses, as evidenced by individual examples: the Georg Jensen Silversmithy had held a strong position in the United States since the 1910s, and Johan Rohde’s comprehensive Acorn cutlery pattern (1915–16) was specifically designed for lavish American dinner parties and became an instant success in the United States.

From 1925 to 1939, the Danish silversmith Erik Magnussen shone with his American Art Deco profile in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. After spending 1924–25 in the United States studying radio manufacturing, the electrical engineer Peter Bang founded the limited company Bang & Olufsen in Denmark in 1925. Denmark participated in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the same year that the Danish furniture designer Jens Risom emigrated to the United States. With the founding of his own company, Jens Risom Design Inc., in 1946, Risom laid the foundation of his career as a designer and manufacturer of furniture with a Danish design influence.

Bernadotte & Bjørn in the transatlantic breakthrough after the Second World War

The substantial significance of the transatlantic outlook after the Second World War and during the early years of the welfare state is easy to document. Both Finn Juhl and Hans J. Wegner submitted interesting competition projects to the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary 1948 International Competition for Low-cost Furniture Design, and the new American organic modernist furniture designed by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames in wood and, subsequently, in plastic stimulated innovation in Danish furniture design concurrently its breakthrough in the United States.

Designs by Hans J. Wegner, Poul Kjærholm and Arne Jacobsen all show references to the Eameses’ Lounge Chair Wood, LCW, (1945) and LCM, a variant of the same with a steel undercarriage, which Jacobsen had in his studio while he was working on his three-legged stackable Ant chair (1952). And it was in 1959, while she was living in Boston, that the Danish architect and furniture designer Bodil Kjær designed her minimal flat-scape desk with a cassette-like rosewood tabletop and an undercarriage in chrome-plated flat steel that featured as a spectacular prop in two of the early James Bond films.

The Danish design vendor Torben Ørskov saw first-hand how garden salads were becoming a feature of American culinary culture. After his return to Denmark, this new development inspired the Danish engineer Herbert Krenchel’s mass-produced Krenit Bowl (1953). Three other iconic Danish kitchen designs from this time also opened the window to the transatlantic winds. The background to the colour drama of anodization in architect and industrial designer Erik Herløw’s cylindrical aluminium jugs with black Bakelite handles (1955) was the American Colorama series from Heller Hostess Ware (1946–55), while the enamelled jugs and cookware in Jens H. Quistgaard’s Købenstyle series (1954) for the company Dansk Designs were specifically intended for the American market.

Among the non-Danish designs that were included in Rosti and Bernadotte & Bjørn’s preliminary studies for the Margrethe bowl, one in particular was influential for the much more clarified form of the Danish bowl. Unlike the Margrethe bowl, however, this model was not made of hard, knockproof melamine but of Lustrex Polystyrol, by Rogers Plastic Corporation in Massachusetts, USA. In other words: concurrently and in interaction with the American enthusiasm for Danish and Scandinavian design, the transatlantic outlook had a tangible impact on Danish design culture in products with an appeal that covered the full social palette, from the elite and the rapidly growing middleclass to mass culture. And many other Danish traces can be found throughout the ‘American Century’ …

Sources

Conversations in 1990-91 with Acton Bjørn and Sigvard Bernadotte.
Conversations in 1991 with Inger Exner, Rolf Grenow, John Paine, Alf Rimer, John Rimer and Jan Trägårdh.
Conversations in 1995 with Jens Risom.
Conversations in 2003 with Herbert Krenchel.
Conversations in 2005 with Bodil Kjær.

Literature

Dybdahl, Lars (1991): Information for the exhibition “Barnadotte & Bjørn. Tegninger. Industrielt design.” Designmuseum Danmark. 1991.
Dybdahl, Lars (2006): Dansk design 1945-1965. København: Borgens Forlag
Dybdahl, Lars (2023): Danish Design history (Dansk designhistorie) bd. 1. Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing.

Further Reading