BRUNO MATHSSON

When the 24-year old carpenter's son Bruno Mathsson (1907-1988) designed a pressed laminate chair laid with plaited strips of saddle girth for the local Värnamo hospital, he was way ahead of Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer whose later designad chairs in the same materials became worldfamous classics.

Bruno Mathsson has always been a pioneer in furniture design. This did not mean much to the staff at Värnamo hospital who christened Mathsson's chair the "grasshopper" and swiftly replaced it with something more traditional.

Years later when Bruno Mathsson came to be regarded as Sweden's greatest furniture designer ever, the grasshopper chairs from 1931 were rediscovered.

All his life, Bruno Mathsson developed bold and functionalistic designs full of simplicity, lightness, suppleness and constructive imagination. After the war he also designed glazed houses in Sweden (for example for singer Alice Babs) and abroad until he got fed up with Sweden's restrictive building norms.

For years he was also at odds with Sweden's traditional -furniture retailers and only sold his radical models through mail order, many years ahead of IKEA.

When DUX eventually took over the production of most of Mathsson furniture, it became more widely known and the newer chairs also became gradually more comfortable.

In the 1960s Bruno Mathsson designed the superelliptical table together with Danish mathematician and poet Piet Hein. The superellips was also used to give shape to Stockholm's Sergelstorg square and just a step away in the Culture House reading rooms generations of Swedes and visitors alike have experienced the Bruno Mathsson comfort in the well-designed chairs.