Hans J. Wegner
1914 Born in Tønder, Denmark
1936 Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts
1938–1943 Furniture designer in Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller´s architectural practice
1943 Office in Gentofte
1959 Royal Society of Arts, London makes him Honorary Royal Designers for Industry
2007 Died in Copenhagen

Hans J. Wegner

“A chair is not a chair before somebody sits down on it,” said Hans J. Wegner, the King of Chairs, as he was also referred to. When this Danish cabinetmaker, architect and furniture designer died in 2007, his estate comprised more than 3500 designs for furniture, including no less than 500 for armchairs and chairs alone, such as his famous Wishbone Chair (1950), or the equally well-known Shell Chair (1963). Simply called The Chair, Wegner’s Round Chair (1949) served Kennedy and Nixon as a seat during the first TV debate in history in 1960. But it still wasn’t the perfect chair that Wegner was striving for. He knew only too well how difficult it is to translate simplicity into tangible reality: “If only you could design just one good chair in your life … But you simply cannot.”

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