Verner Panton

I chose to do Verner Panton as the designer for my exhibition, and here is his biography....

Verner Panton (13 February 1926 - 5 September 1998) is considered to be one of Denmark's most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of available materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Pantons most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).

Panton was trained as architectural engineer in Odense; next, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen. The first two years of his career - 1950-1952 - he worked at the architectural practice of Arne Jacobsen, another famous Danish architect and furniture designer, but Panton turned out to be an "enfant terrible" and he started his own design office in 1955. Near the end of the 1950s, his chair designs became more and more unconventional, with no legs or discernible back. In 1960, Panton was the designer of the very first single-form injection-moulded plastic chair - the Stacking chair or S chair, which would become his most famous and mass-produced design.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Verner Panton experimented with designing entire environments: radical and psychedelic interiors that were an ensemble of his curved furniture, wall upholsterings, textiles and lighting.