Arne Jacobsen Furniture: The Ant, the Egg and Denmark’s Total-Design Vision

Arne Jacobsen never thought of a chair on its own. For him it was one part of a room, the room one part of a building, and the building one part of a landscape or a city street, and he wanted to design all of it. That is why Arne Jacobsen furniture is best understood not as a set of famous shapes but as the visible tip of a much larger method, one that took in seaside resorts, a city hall, a hotel, cutlery and taps. On day four of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the group visits Fritz Hansen in Allerød, the maker that still produces his Ant and Egg chairs. This article explains the thinking that produced them.

From the spoon to the city: Jacobsen’s total design

Arne Jacobsen was born in Copenhagen on 11 February 1902 and studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1924 to 1927, under Kay Fisker and Kaj Gottlob. His graduation project, an art gallery, won a gold medal. He trained as an architect first, and he never stopped thinking like one.

The phrase most often used to describe his approach, borrowed from the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers, is design “from the spoon to the city”. Jacobsen took it literally. Where most architects handed the interiors to others, he designed the furniture, the lamps, the fabrics, the tableware and sometimes the gardens, so that every object in a building shared the same logic. That habit explains why so much Arne Jacobsen furniture was first made for a particular building rather than for a showroom.

Bellevue: designing a whole seaside day

The approach is already clear in his early work at Klampenborg, on the coast north of Copenhagen. The Bellevue Sea Bath opened there in 1932. It was followed by the Bellavista housing development of 1934, white functionalist blocks arranged to face the sea, and by the Bellevue Theatre of 1937, whose retractable roof allowed open-air performances.

At Bellevue Jacobsen did not stop at the buildings. He designed the lifeguard towers, the kiosks, the tickets and even the staff uniforms, so that a visitor’s whole day at the beach, from arrival to the last swim, sat within one consistent design. Decades before the term existed, it was a branded environment, and it set the pattern for the rest of his career.

Aarhus City Hall and a young Hans Wegner

In the late 1930s Jacobsen and Erik Møller won the commission for a new city hall in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city. Inaugurated on 2 June 1941, it was controversial, and the architects were required to add a tower and marble cladding to their original design. The building also brought a remarkable young furniture designer into Jacobsen’s office. In 1938 Hans J. Wegner took leave from his studies to join the project, and he became responsible for the city hall’s furnishings. While working on the building he also began designing three lines of modular office furniture for the manufacturer Planmøbler, an early example of furniture made for one building becoming a product in its own right.

The episode shows how Jacobsen worked. Even when he did not draw every chair himself, he insisted that the furniture be designed for the building rather than bought in. Wegner went on to become one of the great names of Danish furniture in his own right. The tour reaches Aarhus by train on day seven, when the group visits the underground Viking Museum, and the next day brings the ARoS art museum and the ferry to Gothenburg.

Exile, pattern and colour

In 1943, during the German occupation, Jacobsen fled Denmark with help from the Danish resistance, rowing across the Øresund to Sweden. He stayed for about two years. With almost no architectural work available, he turned to designing fabrics and wallpaper. His only architectural commission there was a summer house for two doctors.

The Ant: a chair for a canteen

The design that made Jacobsen’s furniture famous began with a modest commission. In 1952 he designed a chair for the canteen of the Novo pharmaceutical factory, the company now known as Novo Nordisk. The brief called for something light, stable and easy to stack, and the result was the Ant. Its seat and back are shaped from a single sheet of plywood formed into one double-curved shell, and the original version stood on three legs, which kept it light and made it less likely to catch a sitter’s feet under a crowded canteen table.

The chair was a manufacturing challenge as much as a design one. It was put into production by Fritz Hansen, which had worked with Jacobsen since 1934, and how that company learned to bend and press wood on an industrial scale is the subject of our history of Fritz Hansen furniture. Jacobsen’s Model 3107 chair of 1955 took the moulded-shell idea further, and a four-legged version of the Ant was later produced as well.

The Ant marked a different path from much of Danish furniture at the time. From 1927 to 1966 the Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild held an annual exhibition that paired architects with master cabinetmakers, and the classics it launched, such as Hans Wegner’s Round Chair and Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair of 1949, were largely made by hand in workshops. Jacobsen’s industrial chairs, beginning with the Ant, were designed from the start for factory production. Both approaches fed the international boom in Danish furniture that followed, when exports rose from about 9.8 million kroner in 1953 to about 257.8 million kroner in 1964. Jacobsen showed that the Danish concern for comfort, proportion and material could survive the move from the cabinetmaker’s bench to the production line.

The SAS Royal Hotel: the Egg, the Swan and room 606

Jacobsen’s fullest expression of total design was the SAS Royal Hotel in central Copenhagen, built between 1956 and 1960 for Scandinavian Airlines System as a combined luxury hotel and city air terminal. Jacobsen designed the building and, by most accounts, almost everything in it: furniture, lamps, textiles, gardens, tableware and graphics.

The Egg and Swan chairs of 1958 were created for the hotel. Both have curved, enveloping upholstered forms that contrast with the straight lines of a modern lobby, and Fritz Hansen still makes the Egg today. Together they show Jacobsen’s thinking moving beyond plywood towards sculpted, upholstered seating.

The building has since been altered, and most of Jacobsen’s interiors are gone. Room 606, on the sixth floor, is described as the only surviving original interior from the building, a small but complete record of how a Jacobsen room was meant to look and feel.

Objects for the table and the bathroom

The same method reached the smallest scale. For the SAS Royal Hotel he designed the AJ lamp, produced by Louis Poulsen, and in 1957 a set of stainless steel cutlery so spare that Stanley Kubrick later used it in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. His Grand Prix chair took its name from the award it won at the Milan Triennale that year. Later came the Cylinda-Line of stainless steel tableware for Stelton, which won a Danish ID-prize in 1967, and a range of taps for Vola, developed after his 1961 competition win for the Danish National Bank and in production from 1968.

Late buildings and a home of his own

Jacobsen’s later buildings carried the approach abroad. At St Catherine’s College, Oxford, built between 1960 and 1964, he designed the furniture and the gardens as well as the buildings, reportedly down to the species of fish in the pond. The original college buildings were listed Grade I in 1993. In Copenhagen he won the competition for the Danish National Bank in 1961. The building went up in stages between 1965 and 1978 and was completed after his death by Dissing+Weitling, the practice set up by his former employees Hans Dissing and Otto Weitling. The same commission had produced his Vola taps, a reminder that Jacobsen’s buildings and his products so often grew from a single project.

Closer to home, his Søholm terraced houses show the domestic side of his work. Jacobsen lived in one of them until his death in Copenhagen on 24 March 1971.

Seeing Arne Jacobsen furniture on the tour

The Fritz Hansen visit on day four is the clearest connection, because the company that first manufactured the Ant and the Egg still makes them: a canteen chair and a hotel-lobby armchair, seen as long-running industrial products. The afternoon turns from Jacobsen to a younger architect, with lunch back in Copenhagen and a visit to Jørn Utzon’s waterfront furniture showroom, Paustians Hus, before a stop at Superkilen, the public park in Nørrebro. That mix of showrooms and public space is the subject of our guide to museums, showrooms and public space in Copenhagen.

Does the tour visit a design museum in Copenhagen?

Yes. On day five the group visits the Danish Museum of Art & Design (Designmuseum Denmark), which the tour itinerary describes as one of Scandinavia’s central exhibition forums for Danish and international industrial design, decorative and applied arts. The same day includes a talk at the Danform showroom, another Utzon building, and a visit to the Kvadrat textile showroom.

Does the tour visit the SAS Royal Hotel?

No, it is not a scheduled stop. The hotel, now the Radisson Collection Royal Hotel, stands in central Copenhagen, and the free afternoon on day three gives you time to see the building from outside if you wish. Room 606 sits inside a working hotel, so ask the hotel directly before planning to see it.

How physically demanding is the tour?

Plan on three to five hours of physical activity a day, which can mean walking up to about 8 kilometres, at times on uneven ground. The tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate), so travellers should be able to carry their own luggage and use stairs.

Beyond the design studios

Jacobsen is one thread in a larger story. Our overview of Scandinavian design across Denmark, Sweden and Finland follows the whole route, and our introduction to Danish design and its everyday modernism sets his work beside the cabinetmakers and craftsmen of his generation. His warm, considered interiors are sometimes linked with hygge, the Danish taste for cosiness, though his work is far more about precision than mood. Before you go, our practical guide to visiting Denmark covers language and when to travel, and the story of Viking-age Denmark fills in the country’s deeper past.

A Jacobsen chair is easy to admire in a photograph, but its logic only becomes clear in context: on a beach where even the lifeguard towers were designed, in a hotel where the cutlery matched the façade, or in a factory where a canteen chair became a lasting industrial product. Seeing that context in and around Copenhagen is a rewarding way to understand why his furniture still feels modern. From there the tour continues through Sweden’s design schools and glassworks to the architecture of Helsinki, where Jacobsen’s ideas can be compared with those of his Swedish and Finnish contemporaries.