Next we're going to take a look at Denmark, the smallest of the Scandinavian countries. It doesn't have the extensive forests of Sweden or Finland. They import most of the wood that they use in furniture manufacturing and the wood of choice is teak and often has a hand rubbed oil finish creating this kind of soft satin quality. This combined with the kind of curving forms that we see in most of the pieces on display really invite human interaction with the pieces and this is in part why Danish modern furniture becomes so popular in the United States. It combines the traditional use of wood, which is what furniture had been made of for centuries, with very modern, simplified design, free of applied ornament; very much about sculptural form; with a kind of warm and inviting quality to it. And we can see, if we look at this kind of compilation of designs that represent the second half of the 20th century in Danish design, that almost all of them incorporate natural materials and even those that don't have a relationship to nature in some way. Hans Wegner is considered kind of the father of modern Danish design. He was a carpenter, a cabinet maker, very skilled in working with wood; respected the material greatly and developed designs that became sort of icons of Danish modern. This is The Chair and that is actually the name of it; so famous in Denmark that it actually is an image on a stamp. What we have here is an extremely simple form. There's nothing extraneous in this design, yet there's something so sculptural about the way the back moves, or kind of flows, into the arm rests. And the joinery that he develops for this chair is also both simple and complex; it really respects the material and he uses natural materials even to finish this; so he's got a woven seat. He addresses the design of the chair over and over again throughout his career kind of updates it and modernizes it and sometimes we see it also with an upholstered seat. Chairs were, for Wegner, a big focus of his design work and we can see how he takes influence from different cultures as well as from Danish tradition. So he's got this interpretation of a Windsor chair, it's called the Peacock chair, and an interpretation of a Chinese chair, that's called the Wishbone chair. Always with a bit of a sense of humor he designs an upholstered chair called the Ox chair, and we can see it's got this almost like an oxen horns at the back of it. And then at the bottom here we have a chair that actually can function as a wheelbarrow, called the Hoop chair. He also designs in teak like some of his contemporary Danish designers and these kinds of forms like, for instance, the coffee table really talk about functionality, simplicity and design, a real sense of modern design, where it's devoid of all kinds of extraneous elements, but yet focuses so much on the natural materials; and shaping those materials so that they have a kind of soft warmth to them something that Americans really respond to. This is, this is so much to do with, with what American interiors look like in the '50s and '60s. Arne Jacobsen is another of the really seminal architect-designers from Denmark mid-century. And he was, like Wegner, very interested in material, but, unlike Wegner, most interested in modern materials. And so he experiments quite a lot with plywood and bent metal and you can see here that he has produced a number of designs that are extremely reduced, really very much in that idea of "less is more". He's, he's taking the design for instance of this drop leaf table to the most minimum of material that could possibly be used. You couldn't make the legs any thinner, you couldn't use a thinner plywood, without this ceasing to be able to function stably. And it's the same in this flatware that he designs, yet he spends a great deal of time making sure that these pieces are feel comfortable in the hand, that they function well when when a person is eating; so although they're extremely minimal they are very complex in terms of the design process that goes into them. He spends a great deal of time developing a chair with wire legs as well and, again, he's using a very, very, thin plywood and the fact that this plywood is so thin means that the back of the chair has a great deal of flexibility yet it's, it's extremely strong. He begins this design in the early '50s, but eventually changes the design so that it has four legs, because honestly a three-legged chair is almost always unstable; it looks great, it was an interesting design solution, but ultimately it has a kind of element of danger. This is the Royal SAS hotel in Copenhagen designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1959. You can see that it's an International Style building, that kind of monolithic tower with a strong horizontality demarcating each of the floors in the tower, and it clearly expresses the fact that it's made with a curtain wall. At the base of this building it has an arrangement similar to the Unilever building where there's a horizontal slab that the building is placed on; in this case it's not a donut it's actually a completely enclosed building. Arne Jacobsen also designs the interiors of the hotel and here we see a view into the restaurant and a view into the lobby; both of them large open-plan spaces where the lighting and the treatment of the floor become extremely important, so he's developed recessed lighting fixtures for both the lobby and the restaurant. In the restaurant he has these very large open lighting fixtures that spread this kind of soft diffused lighting throughout the space. In the lobby area he breaks up the space by using carpets that become kind of islands creating more intimate seating areas for guests. If we focus, for a moment, just on the designs of the furniture, three of his designs have become really iconic of Mid-century design internationally. The Egg and Swan chair pictured here on the right and this teardrop form pictured on the left; now these are actually views of a room in the hotel that's been restored to show what the interiors looked like originally, the, the hotel rooms don't look like this any longer. But certainly the designs that Arne Jacobsen did at this time have remained almost current and looked just as modern today as they did back in the 1950s. He's using modern materials and modern manufacturing methods in order to create these very organic looking forms. Greta Yalk also uses modern manufacturing methods in these bent plywood chairs. And her idea here was that she would create a chair that was one continuous ribbon of plywood and you can see how extraordinarily sharp those bends are; one wouldn't even think that plywood could withstand that kind of manipulation. Ultimately, she settles on using two pieces of plywood, because she can't quite resolve the problem with just one, and this creates this very elegant, sculptural form; still really respecting the materials but stretching them to their outer boundaries, it just couldn't be folded any more than it is. Verner Panton, another Danish designer, explores color and this is really the big focus of his career. He works, from time to time, for companies that produce home furnishings and carpeting and he has an opportunity to do display work for them and this is actually a display that is showing the rich intense colors that this fabric company could produce. Now at this, at this Expo visitors are actually encouraged to crawl around inside of this space and what he's, what he's, what he's asking them to experience, really, or inviting them to experience, really, is the the different temperatures of color; so, as the visitor enters this space, they start off in a very kind of cool area and they move to progressively warmer areas until they get to that kind of hot, yellow-reddish-orange that's going on in the center of the space. This is from the early 1970s, things have clearly changed a great deal. People are comfortable with crawling around inside of something like this in a public space. Some, that type of relaxed behavior isn't something that would have been thinkable in the 1940s or '50s; really expresses how the youth culture and the kind of relaxed quality to the youth culture has permeated all of society. The forms, themselves, actually ask the participant to sit and converse, to interact in ways that are unusual, so nothing reads as a normal chair or a normal sofa. And we can see that even in his furniture design, this is called the living tower, and it's actually still in production; it is a piece of furniture that can be installed in different ways in an interior and it invites people to actually crawl around in it. You can sit on different levels, you can even sit on the top of this structure, it's all upholstered, and again it encourages people to change their perspective on the room, change their perspective on conversation, and also to interact with something that has this extremely intense color; and you can see just in the way that it's on display in this space that the intensity of the color is actually part of what it is that Verner Panton wants you to connect with. In this interior, also by Pantone, we see his exploration of Op Art. This was a movement in graphic design that played with optical illusion. And you can see on the wall, a kind of wall treatment that includes these little circles and squares, and the alternation of light and dark fields and figures, and he repeats that in the shag carpet on the floor, creating sort of almost a dis-ease in the person that enters the space. It blurs corners and makes it, makes it more difficult to figure out where the floor ends and the wall begins. He's also used intense color in this space. His wife, who's the model for this image, is sitting on a chair that he designs. This is the Panton side chair. This chair is the result of major developments and technology. Designers, for years, try to make a one-piece chair. This becomes sort of a design challenge in modern design. And Pantone is able to create this chair from one continuous piece of plastic in part because of advances in the world of plastics, in the actual chemicals that make up molded plastic, but also in the world of molding plastics. And so what we see here on the left-hand side is the kind of, is the mold for this chair and it would have, of course, another half of the mold that would fit on top of it. And then hot plastic would be injected into this mold. In order for this chair to be structurally sound, when the plastic is injected into the mold it has to be at just the right temperature, and moving at just the right speed, and the mold itself has to be at just the right temperature, because it has to be one smooth movement of the plastic entering the mold all at once and then cooling all at the same time. This went through years of experimentation and finally resulted in this very elegant, kind of fluid design that we see here. These lighting designs are the work of Poul Henningsen, who spends a good part of his career developing designs for lamps. And he starts, actually, by contemplating the light bulb, the light source, and thinking about ways to diffuse that light source and he uses nature as his inspiration. The lamp in the left-hand corner is called the Artichoke lamp and once you know that you can see immediately how this relates to an artichoke, the leaves of the artichoke kind of coming coming down around the light bulb and diffusing light, and he looks at natural forms for the way that they can reflect and diffuse light. He then takes this idea of layers of material and he works with it in lots of different ways, and you can see how he works in metal and works in glass. The forms themselves are simple, elegant solutions to lighting fixture design. And that takes us to Sweden. Sweden, like Finland, has lots of natural resources and lots and lots of birch and pine forests. And the work of Bruno Mathsson reflects, like Alvar Aalto's, an interest in creating modern designs in wood. Looking at this design for an armchair, we see how he's using, again, bent wood, but this time he's actually bending it even more, it has a very kind of curvilinear quality. He's really thinking about how that seat is going to receive the human form. There are no straight lines that meet the body. The curve of the body, received by the curving form, and then these soft textile straps supporting the body, create almost a kind of cocoon, but in a very, very simple design. And here you can see the same design used for a lounge chair. This time upholstered in sheep so that it actually is even softer and even more kind of cradling the human form. He uses the same kind of simple approach with the curving lines for the design of this table. And here approaches practicality to the fullest extent. This is a table that folds down to be not much more than a foot deep, but it opens out to seat as many as 20 people; so it's got two more leaves equal to the size of the leaves that we can see there; so it's, it's an extraordinarily practical piece of furniture and yet the finish of this pieces is warm and inviting and it talks about natural materials like wood so it still retains that kind of warmth that Scandinavian furniture is known for. Now this is a Bruna Mathsson's kind of country home and if you think that this looks an awful lot like the case study houses that we looked at in Cal, in Southern California, you're absolutely right. And, in fact, Matheson travels to America and sees those homes in person; he's really impressed with Mid-century architecture in America and when he gets back home he builds himself a version of American modern architecture. It has a lot of the same kind of elements; we see how the building materials themselves have become part of the aesthetic of the space, there's a lot of indoor/outdoor living, even though it's a colder climate than California, Scandinavians really enjoy being outside even in the winter and have a very strong relationship with their natural environment. The next person we're going to look at in Sweden actually isn't a Swede; it's Josef Frank. And Josef Frank immigrates from Austria, from Vienna, in the late 1920s because he sees things kind of shifting in Austria in a direction that he's not not very pleased with. He makes his home in Sweden and continues his career there and he has great success in the world of textile design and furniture design. We see here, on the left, a number of his textile designs and you see that they're very, very saturated colors. They're very bold prints, kind of oversized, as the scale seems to be almost off, a little bit too big, almost surreal in quality. And this has to do, in part, with influence from the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna. If we think back to the final years of the Wiener Werkstätte, the late '20s and early '30s, you might remember that there's an influence of the Rococo in in their design and you can see that here too. It's not that he's picking up designs from the 18th century Rococo, it's that he's playing with design in a very kind of curvilinear way, in a very playful manner. This kind of textile design has remained sort of at the core of Swedish textile design and continues to influence designs even today. He also was responsible for a number of furniture designs. What's interesting about these two pieces is that they both display a kind of interest in classical design and look back to earlier design in Austria; as a matter of fact we go right back to the Biedermeier with these two pieces. Thinking about how veneer is used on a flat surface, this is a kind of continuous flat surfaces of veneer with no applied ornament, the outlining of geometric forms in a darker wood here expressed in a lighter wood, a kind of simple classicism. And yet, when we look a little bit closer, especially with the piece on the left-hand side we see a kind of asymmetry coming through that tells us that this is not actually Biedermeier, there's something else going on there. So he's taken a great deal of the sort of original inspiration and stated it clearly and plainly, and then shifted one element just enough to throw us off and let us know that this is actually a completely modern design. you