The furniture company Artek is primarily associated with one name: Alvar Aalto. The Finnish grand master founded the company in 1935 together with his wife Aino Aalto, the art collector Maire Gullichsen and the art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl. The furniture designs from that period have long since become untouchable icons – and therefore a difficult legacy for a designer tasked with adding to the collection.
The Norwegian Daniel Rybakken has taken on the task and designed a multifunctional furniture series for Artek. It is called “Kiila” and is a kind of hybrid of clothes rack, wardrobe, bench and pedestal. For the construction, Rybakken adopted the principle of a tripod: the solid wood legs are connected by a wedge-shaped element made of powder-coated steel. The Norwegian designer’s approach is inspired by his great role model Alvar Aalto: Kiila is based on a continuous constructive logic that is repeated in all components of the series and can be reproduced industrially. In this way, Daniel Rybakken succeeds in taking up the Artek tradition and yet developing a new design language.