Alvar Aalto Bent One Leg and Built a Company on It

In 1927 a young Finnish architect couple, Aino and Alvar Aalto, won first prize in a competition for a new city library in Viipuri, then part of Finland. Their entry went by the name "W.W.W." The building took eight years to finish. Money ran short, the site moved, and the design kept changing on paper from 1928 to 1933, sliding from a classical scheme to something entirely modern. When the Viipuri City Library finally opened in 1935, its lecture hall had an undulating ceiling of red-hearted pine, shaped for sound, and a stack of plain wooden stools for extra seating.

Those stools had three legs, a round seat and no ornament at all. Alvar Aalto had designed them in 1933. Ninety-three years later the same stool, Stool 60, is still being made in Finland, and it remains one of the best-known things Aalto ever drew.

The problem with corners

The hard part of a wooden stool is where the leg meets the seat. Traditional furniture solved it with joinery, mortises and tenons and dowels cut and fitted by hand. That is slow, and slow means expensive. Aalto wanted furniture that a factory could make in series.

The answer came out of the early 1930s, when the Aaltos had moved their office to Turku and fallen in with a local furniture maker named Otto Korhonen. Korhonen ran a factory near the city, Huonekalu- ja rakennustyötehdas, and he knew wood the way Aalto knew form. Together they worked out a way to bend solid birch.

The Alvar Aalto Foundation describes the method plainly. Saw cuts are made into one end of a birch blank. Thin pieces of wood, coated in glue, are forced into the gaps. The end is then bent to 90 degrees with heat and steam, and when it sets you have a leg with its own built-in corner. That L-shaped leg screws straight to the underside of the seat. No joint, no fuss, and very little hand work. Aalto patented the technique in 1933 as Patent 18666, under the title "A way of bending wood and objects manufactured in this way."

There is a story that Aalto tested an early prototype by throwing it at the ground, over and over, to see whether it would break. It is the kind of test the stool still seems built to pass.

Three legs and a stack

The leg made the stool. The stool also made the most of the leg. With three L-legs set under a round seat, Stool 60 stacks into towers to save space, which is exactly what a library lecture hall needs from its spare seating. The four-legged version, the E60, came from the same idea, and Barstool 64 stretches four L-legs taller still.

The L-leg was the first of a family. A Y-leg followed in the 1940s and an X-leg in the 1950s, all growing out of the same bent-wood thinking that Aalto and Korhonen started on. The Aaltos had already been bending laminated plywood in 1932, work that produced Armchair 41 for the Paimio Sanatorium, and the story reads well next to our histories of the Bauhaus and Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair, modernism worked out in a different material.

A shop called Artek

A clever stool needs someone to sell it. In December 1935, in Helsinki, four people founded a company to do that. Two were the Aaltos. The third was Maire Gullichsen, a promoter of the visual arts, and the fourth was the art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl. They called it Artek, a made-up word meant to join art and technology, an idea very much in the air of the International Style and the Bauhaus.

Artek's first job was to sell the Aaltos' furniture and glassware and to furnish the buildings coming out of Alvar Aalto's office. Production stayed with Korhonen. A three-way agreement tied together his factory, the Aaltos and Artek, and Artek has sourced its Aalto pieces from that factory ever since. The factory itself was later renamed Huonekalutehdas Korhonen Oy and moved to Littoinen, near Turku.

Aino Aalto, an architect in her own right and her husband's partner on the furniture, died in 1949. Alvar died in Helsinki in 1976. Artek carried on, adding work by other Finnish designers such as Ilmari Tapiovaara and Eero Aarnio, and the Bouroullec brothers have since designed for it too. If you want a Danish counterpoint from the same century, our pieces on the Hans Wegner Wishbone chair and the Arne Jacobsen Egg chair cover the neighbors.

Who owns the stool now?

In 1992 the founders' families handed majority control to Proventus, a Swedish family-owned investment company. On 6 September 2013, Dezeen reported that the Swiss furniture company Vitra had bought Artek. The price was not disclosed. Vitra said Artek would run as a separate company, with no immediate change in management or manufacturing. A few months later, in early 2014, the new owners also bought the Aalto furniture production of the Korhonen factory, the place where the L-leg was worked out in the first place. Some coverage dates the Vitra takeover to 2014, but that appears to fold the factory purchase into the earlier deal. The 2013 date is the one Dezeen reported at the time.

So the stool still comes from the same corner of southwest Finland, now under Swiss ownership. Artek calls it a native birch product. The legs and the band around the seat edge are solid birch, and the seat core is solid birch or birch plywood. Tops come in birch veneer, laminate, linoleum, fabric or leather. It ships flat and goes together at home. Artek's own claim is that time has shown the stool lasts at least 50 years.

Living with a much-copied classic

Dezeen calls Stool 60 the much-copied classic, which is polite. Three legs, a round seat and a bent corner look easy to imitate. The part that took a patent is the leg, and that is still where the original earns its price.

Artek has its own answer to the copies. Since 2006 its 2nd Cycle program has bought back used Artek and Korhonen furniture and resold it, repaired when needed, with the wear treated as part of the charm. An old Stool 60 with a scuffed linoleum top and a faded seat is not a lesser object. It is the stool doing what Aalto designed it to do, which is take a beating and get stacked again.

The newer editions play with the surface. Stool 60 Celebration carries laser-engraved drawings, and the Lokki, Kivet and Seireeni versions put marquetry patterns into the seat. None of them change the leg.

Use one as a side table, a plant stand or a seat for the friend who shows up late. Stack three in a corner and they look like a small sculpture.

For more, see our Furniture hub, Industrial Design hub and the Design section.

The Viipuri library is in Russia now, in the city called Vyborg, and its restoration was completed in late 2013. Wooden stools are stacked in it again.