Tracing the steps of Arne Jacobsen

As Arne Jacobsen’s grandson, Tobias Jacobsen grew up surrounded by the globally acclaimed architect’s designs. Here he describes how a discovery of fabric and pattern designs helped him understand his grandfather’s artistic sensibilities, love of nature and organic form universe. 


Childhood
I grew up surrounded by my grandfather’s design; more as unconscious sensory impressions than as something I really thought about. I remember leaning back on and toppling the three-legged Ant chair, and I remember how tricky it was to handle our knives and forks – the AJ cutlery. I remember losing myself for hours in my grandfather’s watercolours. To me, they were simply pictures on the wall. I clearly recall a picture of an Italian village square with a small café and a tower ruin with a clock where I could see all the pencil lines that he used to get the clock and the hands into the correct perspective. There are many people milling about, and power lines are strung between the buildings. The pictures fuelled my imagination, inspiring big stories about the city, its people and secret rooms and dungeons. 

We lived in one of my grandfather’s houses, the Kubeflex. A system of room-sized elements for holiday cottages, designed for the standard-house manufacturer N. S. Høm in 1969–70. Kubeflex was never put into production, but we lived in the show house near the beach in a summer cottage area in southern Zealand. A stringent, cubist house that was flooded with daylight. It stood out among the other ‘cigar-box’ cottages in the areas, and the locals called it ‘the public toilet’ because the wall panels toward the road were windowless and made the house look uninhabited. On the garden side, however, there were lots of windows and light.


A Home of Cubes and Colours 
The interior design was minimalistic. There was virtually never any mess, because we simply did not have room for it. A sense of order permeated our home and the way we lived. There were lots of colours in the house – green, red, white and yellow surfaces. The Vola bathroom fittings were orange. The house was full of chalk drawings my grandfather had done, for example a scene depicting a Swedish cottage with mountains and a fiord that I dreamt of rowing out on. My mother had got hold of some of grandfather’s fabrics, produced in Sweden, with red and green leaves. She used the fabric to sew both curtains and covers for our seat cushions. 

That was my childhood home, with all his watercolours, fabrics and colours. When my friends visited, they thought our home was very different. They struggled to use the cutlery and tipped over on the three-legged chairs. They thought it was odd that our home looked the way it did. We definitely stood out in the small town where we lived – but we never spoke about grandfather. During the 1970s he was extremely famous. not to say world-famous. We learned, from an early time, to keep a low profile to avoid giving the wrong impression. It was an atypical childhood, a balancing act, to live so differently without discussing why.

For me, the major shift in perspective occurs when I begin my apprenticeship as a goldsmith at 20 years of age. Gradually, I come to realize what a great and amazing man my grandfather is, and what he has accomplished. His design and architecture become a direct inspiration, and some of my jewellery designs look like tiny modular buildings. Overall, the expression and names of my small creations bear clear references to architecture, for example ‘Sydney’ and ‘Towers of Sienna’, the latter referencing the tower in my grandfather’s watercolour that I looked at as a child. 

The Attic

Going to Sweden in a Rowing Boat 

To understand my grandfather, you have to delve into the box in the attic with the patterns from Sweden. At some point as a young adult, I go into the attic in my parents’ house. Here I find cardboard boxes full of fabrics and pattern designs. Created during grandfather’s stay in Sweden where he sought refuge during the Second World War. In 1943, as a Danish citizen of Jewish descent, he had to leave for Sweden, fleeing across the Øresund strait in a rowing boat. Also on the boat were his new wife, Jonna, and his good friend Poul Henningsen, a well-known Danish designer and social critic. Another good friend, the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, helped the Jacobsens find a flat in Stockholm. In his exile, my grandfather began to paint watercolours and patterns, working on an easel, the same way he had painted the pictures I saw on the wall as a child. Designing patterns on an easel is a technically demanding task requiring a steady hand and a systematic approach where the canvas is divided into a grid. Due to the war-time austerity, people were wearing second-hand clothes, and the dominating colour scheme was black and brown. In contrast to this drab backdrop, his fabrics are extremely colourful, floral and organic, a far cry from the functionalist architecture he was known for at the time. 

‘If I Get a Second Life, I Want to be a Gardener’
The fabrics in the cardboard box were a surprising discovery for me. They were nothing like my grandfather. And then again ... His use of light and the organic shapes from nature are at the core of all his works. He was a passionate horticulturist and is quoted as saying, ‘If I get a second life, I want to be a gardener’. His sketches of flowers and leaves do not conjure up some fantasy universe but are correct botanical reproductions, complete with Latin names added in pencil in his neat hand. He was an important landscape architect.

Many of his architectural projects include a garden. The best known is probably the garden he created for his own terraced house in the Søholm development in Klampenborg (1951) on the coast north of Copenhagen. Covering just 300 square metres, it has an almost labyrinthine distribution of open spaces and passages and contains 300 different species of plants. But he also created gardens in more unusual settings. For example, my grandfather included a Japanese-style atrium garden in his design of Danmarks Nationalbank (1971). The garden complements the stringent, almost fortress-like building, which does not simply appear as a solid cube but has light-and-shadow effects throughout the building that give rise to an almost transparent expression. When he designed St. Catherine’s College in Oxford (1960–63), he was almost more preoccupied with the design of the park than of the building itself. 

Playing with Light 
The box in the attic contained qualities I never previously associated with my grandfather: sensuous tactility, lush natural forms and light. In the many patterns he plays with light and seeks to depict reflections in water and the way tiny water creatures stand out as bright flashes of light. Perhaps inspired by the hours he spent in the rowing boat on Øresund on a starry night, constantly worrying about being caught due to the large amounts of phosphorescence swirling around the boat in the dark water. 

In creating these botanical watercolours, which he painted on location, in nature, he spends a long time working out the shadows and giving them the exact shape he wanted, precisely as if he had been working on a design or an architectural project. He does not simply draw things but seeks to reproduce the surrounding space.

Work 

The Most Beautiful Pattern in the World 
The fabrics in the attic and the watercolours were created by a gifted artist. Working with surfaces and depths and the colours of nature comes naturally to my grandfather. The earthy organic colour palette is quite evident in his fabrics and wallpapers but also in his buildings. Take the  SAS Hotel in Copenhagen (now the Radisson Collection Royal Hotel), where the interior orchid garden, illuminated by skylights, uses hanging orchids as room dividers. And where the delicate glazing bars in the facade imbue the building with daylight, textural qualities and transparency, bringing out the beautiful green colour of the building itself and the stunning pattern formed by the tiny shadows and vertical lines. Some called it ‘the punchcard’, comparing its appearance to the cards used for data input in early digital computers, and he actually did not mind the nickname. Take a look at the building; it has the most beautiful pattern in the world. 

An Artist’s Palette 
My grandfather had an artist’s sensibilities and began drawing from a young age. I have seen drawings he made when he was 12 years old: vivid representations of a residential neighbourhood at winter time, perfectly correct in its representation of architecture and perspective and with naked, bone-like trees. It is quite apparent that he wants to be an artist, but his parents were convinced that architecture was a better choice, and so that was the path he took. 

The watercolours and pattern designs give my grandfather an outlet for his artistic talents. His grasp of reflections, colours and the interplay of light and shadow gives his fabrics a vivid, textural, almost three-dimensional feel with a sense of depth and perspective. His total environmental designs, such as the Bellevue Theatre (1935), the SAS Hotel(1956–61) and St. Catherine’s College (1960–63), clearly reflect his desire to bring light, shadow and textures together in a harmonious architectural expression. I think that grasp stems from his artistic sensibilities and his painter’s hand. 

Many are convinced that Arne Jacobsen preferred white walls. However, his own terraced house in the Søholm development is full of experiments with the effects of coloured walls. Personally, I have always seen my grandfather’s colour palette as earthy notes of green, grey, red and blue – both in furniture and on walls. This view is expanded when I see the colour palette for the Munkegaard School in Gentofte (1957) and Rødovre Main Library (1961–69). Bright green and orange create an almost childish palette and demonstrate that my grandfather was capable of creating learning environments in a surprising orgy of colour. He fully embraces the naive and childish colour universe with bright, cheerful hues – a far cry from more common and aesthetically ‘appropriate’ colours.

My Grandfather’s Evil Eye 
My grandfather passed away many years ago. For the past 30 years I have managed his legacy, making sure that products are not modified or produced in new colours without my personal approval. I think of myself as my grandfather’s ‘evil eye’, as I try to maintain painstaking quality standards rather than just going along with proposed ideas and changes. It is clear to see that even a minor change to my grandfather’s designs can cause the entire design to come apart. To see that, one has to move past the fascination of the form itself and examine the design in depth: right here he did something – why did he do that? I have these conversations with him daily, even though he is not here anymore. Over the years, I have learned to understand what he is trying to accomplish. 

The process is like going through that box in the attic. I keep discovering new things he drew or painted – landscapes, portraits, sketches of new chairs or lamps. I have initiated the establishment of a digital library of his work. In Arne Jacobsen Design I/S, we have initiated the establishment of a digital library of his work, where fabric and pattern designs alone account for nearly 100 different items. It is difficult to find the watercolours that his patterns are based on, but fortunately, many of them have been preserved by collectors. In Sweden, some of the manufacturers who produced his fabrics have kept and preserved the originals. Something new is discovered on an almost daily basis. 

Light and shadow 

Playing with Mathematics
Something happens after the war. My grandfather returns from Sweden, and there is a change in his fabric patterns. He turns to graphic and geometric designs and plays with mathematics. Angles and Ypsilon (1963) are examples of his later pattern designs. 

As always, he is fascinated with light and also creates several lamps, including AJ Floor and AJ Table (1959). In their geometric form, based on cones and cylinders, they show a clear kinship with his contemporary fabrics. In stark contrast to the colour scheme, transparency and textural qualities of his architecture, these lamps appear almost as a pattern in an expanse of colour. 

Take a room that he designs lamps and chairs for. If you see it as a surface, it is almost like looking at one of his graphic patterns. His lamps have a stringent form, although their output is something as soft as light. The contrast is crucial. If the form of the lamp were organic too, the overall result would be too messy. 

The Egg – an Homage to Nature
His chairs span the same range from stringent to organic form. To me, the Ant (1952), Series 7 (1955) and the Egg and the Swan (1958) are homages to nature. Geometric but also very organic, with soft, rounded shapes that relate to nature. My grandfather managed to imbue his designs with an organic feel referring back to his time in Sweden with its beautiful, romantic forms. 

The Egg has been called the most beautiful chair in the world. I think it is because the design makes us see and appreciate the entire space around the chair and not just the chair itself. The Egg captures light and shadow and shapes the space around it. The chair brings beauty to even the ugliest space. Whatever size or shape you are, you will look great in this chair. The Egg’s organic shape and name draw a straight line back to his Swedish exile during the war, when he lived out his inner artist and gardener. So to understand my grandfather, you have to delve into the box in the attic with his fabrics from Sweden.