Arne Jacobsen

Arne Emil Jacobsen was a Danish architect and designer, born in Copenhagen on 11 February 1902. He studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1924 to 1927. While still a student, he gained early international recognition in 1925, when he won a silver medal for a chair design at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. After graduating, he first worked in the architectural office of Poul Holsøe before establishing his own studio.

Throughout his career, Arne Jacobsen designed buildings, furniture, lighting and everyday objects with a highly disciplined and refined sense of form. He is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of Danish Modern design, and many of his projects were conceived as complete interior and architectural environments.

For Louis Poulsen, Jacobsen designed the hemispherical AJ Royal pendant in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. At the hotel, the lamp appeared in a copper version above the tables in the snack bar behind the atrium, in the lounge on the first floor, and in the Panorama Lounge on the twenty-first floor. When first introduced, the model was simply known as the AJ Pendant.

The AJ Royal formed part of Jacobsen’s complete design concept for the hotel, together with the AJ lamp series and other now-iconic designs such as the Egg and Swan chairs. The SAS Royal Hotel, which opened in 1960, became one of the clearest examples of Jacobsen’s total-design approach, in which architecture, lighting, furniture and interior details were conceived as a unified whole.

Among Jacobsen’s best-known furniture designs are the Ant, Series 7, Egg and Swan chairs, all of which helped shape the international image of Danish design in the post-war period. Arne Jacobsen died on 24 March 1971, while several major projects were still in progress.