Jakob Berg: Furniture

Jakob Berg - Furniture

Jakob Berg (1958-2008) is one of the most innovative Danish furniture designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. His designs are rooted in the principles of the Danish Golden Age of design yet advance the traditional idiom of form, granting entirely new approaches in terms of sustainability and materials. This new book from Arnoldsche Art Publishers is the first comprehensive monograph on the significant Scandinavian designer.

Jakob Berg trod new ground in his concepts for sitting and resting – always driven by a steadfast belief in design's capacity to provoke change. Although he was not part of any large design office, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a wide range of exceptional furniture: contemporary classics that still are being manufactured twenty years after their evolution. Jakob Berg was also a prominent pioneer of sustainable furniture design and headed three large visionary projects with the support of Danida, the Danish Foreign Affairs' development cooperation body. While exploring moulded bamboo, he soon realised its potential for furniture production, resulting in the world's first stackable chair in this material, which he named Grass. One of Berg's constant concerns was minimising the use of material sand integrating several functions and opportunities for use in a single piece, a practice constituting an important source of inspiration, especially for emerging generations of designers.

The publication Jakob Berg – Furniture provides an overview of the designer's works: from the first individual pieces from the 1980s to his innovative upholstered furniture as well as his indoor/outdoor series – furniture that is as timeless and elegant as it is practical, for use in private homes, hotels, hospitals and gardens across the globe.

Some 300 images – photographs of sofas, chairs and tables as well as numerous models, prototypes and sketches – are accompanied by texts from leading design experts, many of whom knew Jakob Berg personally and who approach his work from widely differing perspectives. The monograph was created on the initiative of Dorte Østergaard Jakobsen, Jakob Berg's long-term partner both personally and professionally, who co-edited the book with design critic Pernille Anker Kristensen. With its clean visual and tactile aesthetic, the publication, designed by Kenneth Schønning Olsson, is itself an example of exceptional Danish design.


From the introduction
Designer Jakob Berg consistently moved beyond the, at the time, still very pronounced disciplinary ties to the 'golden age' of Danish furniture design epitomized by Hans J. Wegner, Finn Juhl and Arne Jacobsen. Before the breakthrough of the fairly retrospective and referential approach to furniture design that, by contrast, characterized the New Nordic wave after the turn of the millennium, Jakob Berg stood out as a member of the irreverent middle generation who during the 1980s and 1990s moved away from the largely exhausted Danish furniture tradition, choosing an alternative path in search of a new mental landscape in dialogue with the international postmodernist turn. And rather than pursuing a dream of an individual stellar career in the new globalized design scene, Jakob Berg demonstrated, as a core social value in his distinctive design practice, how a promising future path towards a new turn in Danish furniture design might take shape in a design-based collaboration with small-scale manufacturers in developing countries aimed at developing a sustainable furniture production.
/ Lars Dybdahl