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FEATURING A CURVED CONCRETE ROOF, KUKKAPURO’S STUDIO ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF HELSINKI WAS BUILT BY THE DESIGNER AND HIS WIFE IRMELI IN 1968
Almost every school, museum and airport in Finland has featured Kukkapuro’s chairs and has amassed more than 40 prototypes, experimental and production pieces. ‘Yrjö thinks about everything – form, function, ergonomics, colour. He’s imaginative, but practical, too. For me, he is one of the most important designers in the world,’ he says. A fourth Color Experiment chair launches this spring at the gallery, and with such a wealth of prototypes in stock, it’s not hard to imagine future collaborations. In the middle of the studio is a unique three-seater sofa painted with a mountain scene. It is the result of a chaotic visit in 1972 from Pino Milas, a graphic design pal, in need of some R&R, who was tasked by Kukkapuro to decorate it. Life in the atelier was unconventional. Friends, assistants and collaborators came and went with frequency. Isa’s bedroom was a small annexe off the tiny kitchen; Kukkapuro and Irmeli slept in a bed partitioned off behind a bookcase and the bathrooms were two fibreglass pods with showerheads. Kukkapuro won many prizes, and trips abroad for lectures and exhibitions
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were also common; the three of them once piled into their Mini Clubman, packed a tent in the boot, and hit the road for four months. A prototype called the ‘Simple’ chair is wheeled in (we are its first audience). It has been shipped from China and is the first version of what Kukkapuro hopes will be ‘the simplest chair in the world’. It has a black leather seat, a black plywood back and a steel frame and looks suitably straightforward. Kukkapuro walks around it, shaking his head. It’s a bit too high, and, he thinks, the steel arms might be nicer in ash. It will go back to Avarte, which has produced his pieces for 20 years, to be tweaked. Kukkapuro first went to China in 1997, at the invitation of architect and scholar Fang Hai, to give lectures on contemporary design in universities. It was the start of a new chapter. There, he worked with master carpenter Yin Hongqian to create the East West Collection, a series of chairs that combine clean lines with lacquered bamboo and Chinese joinery. These, along with
historical pieces manufactured by Avarte, flooded the Chinese market and Kukkapuro’s fortunes were transformed. At the same time, Finland was recovering from the recession of the late 1980s and the focus at home had shifted to eco-design. Kukkapuro created a solid wood collection in unpopular, overlooked elder. It bombed. When he took it to a fair in Berlin, a visitor congratulated him on having such a strong Finnish style. ‘I was crushed. There I was, thinking I was an international designer!’ Thus, when Helsinki’s design museum invited him to create a series of ‘visually exciting’ chairs in 1993, Kukkapuro called on a friend, the late Finnish graphic designer Tapani Aartomaa, and together they created Tattooed, a collection of plywood chairs decorated with bold slogans and eye-popping motifs of trees, dragons and tigers. Colour also made it onto his ‘CNC’ chairs, designed in 2008 for his retrospective at the museum, to celebrate the potential of computer-controlled machinery. ‘The idea was to show how efficiently technology can be used on materials.’ How many chairs has Kukkapuro made in his lifetime? ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Around 100? One day I shall have to count them.’ yrjokukkapuro.com
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