Pressing Matter
The perfect marriage of form to function.
By Paul Makovsky
November 2003
About five years ago Danish designer Jakob Berg had the idea to create
a chair that would appear to be one continuous, flowing piece of wood.
He began exploring possible forms by making curved incisions into flat
pieces of paper and then folding them into 3-D models. After much experimentation,
Berg finally made a prototype out of plywood, which was chosen for
publication in the London-based International Design Yearbook. A
Latvian company found a picture of it in the book and contacted him with
a request to put it into production. The ICF Group (
www.icfsource.com) debuted it at this year's NeoCon furniture fair, and now
the chair is available for distribution in North America. Impressed by its
simple elegance, I asked Berg to talk about the design process.
I originally called the prototype Flow because it looks like it has one
continuous surface. I'm not sure why it is named Annika, which is a common
Swedish name. Perhaps the ICF Group changed it for legal reasons. I'm a
little baffled (he laughs).
The chair is made out of a plywood, called airplane ply, that was invented
originally for airplane wings. It's strong and is constructed of very thin
layers, which makes it very pliable. I joined layers of veneer with glue
and then pressed them in a big mold made of solid wood, much like Charles
Eames did when he designed his molded-plywood chair.
The prototype took quite a lot of development because I had to figure
out how to produce it as a molded-plywood chair without it being too technical--that
is, how to make a model that you could press in one pressing. I worked with
different solutions and finally came up with the idea of attaching
the back legs to the rest of the chair. The front, seat, and back are made
of one piece, and the back legs are added on afterward.
The Annika chair is available in natural or bleached birch, natural beech,
natural cherry, natural maple, and birch stained in beech, cherry, mahogany,
wenge, or black. |
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chair height: 33 in.
seat height: 18 in.
width: 20 in.
The chair has a thickness of 3/4 in., making it very stackable. |
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Jakob Berg (b. 1958) grew up in Roskilde, outside of Copenhagen,
Denmark. He graduated from the department of industrial design at the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1987 and then worked at various design
firms for about ten years, including architects Dissing + Weitling and the
industrial designer David Lewis. In 1997 Berg opened his own design studio,
working mostly for Danish companies, including creating garden furniture for
Trip Trap and outdoor hardwood furniture in sustainable wood for furNature. He
is currently designing a line of noninstitutional furniture for nursing homes,
which debuts this fall. The Annika chair is in the permanent collection of the
Museum of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen.
Images courtesy the manufacturer |
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