FOCUS: ARCHITECTMADE

MORTEN T JENSEN, director of ARCHITECTMADE, the Copenhagen-based manufacturer specialising in classic product and tabletop designs by Denmark’s leading historic architects, admits he’s no creative. What Jensen is especially good at is recognising a product that will have serious legs. Many of the designs under the ARCHITECTMADE portfolio - established four years ago and growing - were never ever put into production, but rather were discovered by Jensen in the homes and archives of the likes of Finn Juhl, Poul Kjaerholm and Peter Karpf.

Being architects, these great men never specialised in product design, but, says Jensen, this is their appeal. “Because there was no pressure for any of their products to work commercially, they really come from the heart. You can tell they are things that have been thought about and thought about, often over a number of years.”

Examples of the company’s finds include the drawings of the famous Copenhagen ducks that made headlines in the late 1950s when a photographer captured a duck family stopping traffic in the country’s capital (the resulting poster - click to enlarge - can be seen at the very bottom). The ducks - made just for fun by Hans Bølling and pictured right - have recently been reissued by Jensen in solid teak (£34 for the baby size, and £64 for the mother). Manufactured in a small workshop in China (not a bad thing in Jensen’s own words, because the quality is the same as the Copenhagen woodturners that hand-make his phenomenally successful oak BIRD range, pictured top), they are that perfect balance of solid materials and simplicity that has come to exemplify Danish design.

Also new from the stable that also produces non-bird objects - including a seductive hollowed-out granite bowl/ashtray, the PK Bowl 600 by Poul Kjaerholm, the only product design he ever fashioned and which was never commercially produced before - is a child’s chair, pictured left. Designed by the late Kristian Vedel (he of the cult BIRD), Jensen discovered it in the home of Vedel’s widow. She was naturally enthusiastic about the opportunity to re-realise her husband’s work that was one of the very first modern children’s chairs to hit the shops in the mid 20th Century. It’s been reissued in sturdy, non-destructible bent plywood, and works in a number of ways thanks to removeable, slot in seat / table. It can support a smaller baby sitting upright, can become a rocking doll’s cot on its side, a table or footstool when inverted, and, as Jensen admits from his truly globe-trotting life promoting the company - product-stuffed suitcase in hand - an emergency seat for leg-weary adults too…

*Find ARCHITECTMADE’s full range at Panik Design (www.panik-design.com) in the UK, several pieces at Skandium, or see the ARCHITECTMADE website for international stockist details. The birds can be bought at the MomaStore.

**You can find more information about each architect on the ARCHITECTMADE website.

The famous duck poster