There’s a way that we’re tiring of design taking itself fairly so significantly. Latest gala’s and launches recommend a palpable pushback in opposition to the algorithmic sameness of pixel-perfect, beige interiors, alongside a renewed urge for food for adornment that’s playful, satirical and just a little subversive. It makes this 12 months’s Verner Panton centenary really feel completely timed. Greatest identified for his exuberant use of color and sample, and for swooping, futuristic kinds, Panton approached interiors as full environments: areas to inhabit, not merely admire.
‘The primary function of my work is to impress individuals into utilizing their creativeness,’ stated Panton. ‘Most individuals spend their lives in dreary, grey-beige conformity, mortally afraid of utilizing colors. By experimenting with lighting, colors, textiles and furnishings and using the newest applied sciences, I attempt to present new methods to encourage individuals to make use of their phantasy and make their environment extra thrilling.’
The centenary is being marked in 2026 by a serious exhibition and year-long programme of occasions on the Vitra Design Museum
(Picture credit score: Vitra)
The centenary is being marked in 2026 by a serious exhibition and year-long programme of occasions on the Vitra Design Museum in collaboration with Verner Panton Design AG. Nevertheless it additionally seems like a well timed reminder of simply how radical – and the way unapologetically enjoyable – Panton’s imaginative and prescient actually was. Lengthy earlier than ‘immersive’ turned a advertising buzzword, he was constructing whole environments: rooms the place color, gentle, furnishings and textiles fused right into a single sensorial expertise, designed to be lived in as a lot as checked out. This is every part you have to find out about this design legend.
Who was Verner Panton?
(Picture credit score: Verner Panton Design AG)
Born on the Danish island of Funen in 1926, Panton skilled as an architect at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of High-quality Arts, coming of age in a tradition that revered restraint. Even then, he was drawn much less to Danish modernism’s quiet self-discipline than to the brand new potentialities rising via business: moulded plastics, artificial textiles, mass manufacturing.
Within the early Fifties he labored briefly within the studio of Arne Jacobsen (who turned a lifelong pal and mentor), contributing to the period’s defining experiments in furnishings – however his personal instincts had been already pulling him in a unique, altogether extra animated route.
Verner Panton, Key Initiatives
Kom Igen restaurant
The restaurant on the ‘Kom Igen’ inn was designed by Verner Panton in 1958
(Picture credit score: © Verner Panton Design AG)
Panton’s breakthrough got here not via a showroom, however a restaurant. In 1958, Panton was requested by his father to revamp and lengthen the household inn, Kom Igen. It was an early glimpse of what would change into his modus operandi: a mission approached not as an inside, however as an entire world.
Marianne and Verner Panton seated within the Cone Chairs
(Picture credit score: Verner Panton Design AG)
The end result was theatrical and all-encompassing. Drenched in 5 shades of pink, it encompassed lighting, textiles, furnishings and graphics. Among the many items developed for the mission was the Cone Chair, an inverted upholstered funnel perched on a slender base: a design that signalled his rising language of geometry, sensuality and provocation. The chair caught the attention of Percy von Halling-Koch, who established the corporate Plus-linje in an effort to put it into manufacturing. Quickly after got here the Coronary heart Cone Chair, and an entire sequence of cone-shaped furnishings.
The Panton chair
(Picture credit score: Vitra)
If Kom Igen was the beginning of Panton’s world-building, the Panton chair would change into his emblem. In 1956, he produced an earlier S-shaped bent plywood design – the S Chair – for German producer Thonet. Over the next decade, Panton continued refining the idea, ultimately realising it for serial manufacturing in collaboration with Vitra, which launched the Panton Chair in 1967. A single, steady S-curve, moulded in a single piece, it was a technical feat as a lot as a chunk of furnishings – and one which shortly got here to symbolise a brand new period of design optimism. It was additionally a landmark for Vitra itself: the primary product the corporate developed independently, born from a partnership keen to embrace danger, time and industrial trial-and-error.
Visiona
Verner Panton’s ‘Fantasy Panorama’ (A part of the Visiona II, 1970) stays one of many twentieth century’s defining statements on inside as expertise
(Picture credit score: © Verner Panton Design AG)
Panton’s true ambition lay not in remoted objects, however in atmospheres – environments the place furnishings turned half of a bigger panorama. That method reached its fullest expression in Visiona, the sequence of experimental interiors he created on a Rhine tour steamer in 1968 and 1970 in the course of the annual Cologne furnishings truthful. Commissioned by Bayer as a showcase for the corporate’s newest artificial supplies, the exhibitions felt like alternate realities: saturated landscapes of color, tender sculptural kinds and artificial surfaces, the place guests might lounge, recline and drift via gentle.
Essentially the most well-known of those installations, ‘Fantasy Panorama’ (A part of the Visiona II, 1970), stays one of many twentieth century’s defining statements on inside as expertise – a psychedelic topography of upholstered kinds that blurred flooring, wall and ceiling right into a steady home terrain. It encapsulated Panton’s perception that design must be felt bodily, not merely appreciated intellectually: an insistence that the house could possibly be an area of play, sensuality and even escapism. Vitra, amongst different licensees of Verner Panton Design AG, continues to supply designs developed for Visiona, together with Amoebe seating and the Dwelling Tower, a vertical upholstered construction that turns furnishings right into a type of inhabitable sculpture.
Der Spiegel Headquarters
The pool on the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel, designed by Panton in 1969
(Picture credit score: © Verner Panton Design AG)
From there, Panton’s work moved into an unlikely enviornment: the company workplace. In 1969, he was invited to revamp the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel. The temporary demanded seriousness and dignity, however Panton delivered one thing far stranger and extra bold – a complete inside of built-in lighting, colored panels, reflective surfaces and boldly zoned flooring, together with an otherworldly health facility and swimming pool. It was a reminder that his method was not merely ornamental, however psychological: color as a software to form behaviour, temper and a spotlight.
A gathering room on the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel, designed by Panton in 1969
(Picture credit score: © Verner Panton Design AG)
‘Selecting colors shouldn’t be a raffle,’ he as soon as stated. ‘It must be a aware resolution. Colors have a that means and a operate.’ Even consolation, for Panton, was inseparable from ambiance: ‘One sits extra comfortably on a color that one likes.’
Restaurant Varna
Restaurant Varna in Aarhus was designed by Panton in 1971
(Picture credit score: © Verner Panton Design AG)
The same spirit animated his redesign of Restaurant Varna in Aarhus within the early Nineteen Seventies, one other landmark in his lifelong pursuit of the gesamtkunstwerk – the overall murals. Right here once more, Panton handled interiors as a type of immersive theatre, layering textiles, lighting and furnishings right into a choreographed entire. The purpose was not subtlety however transformation: to stroll via the door was to enter a brand new world.
Non-public Home at Binningen
Panton pictured together with his daughter Carin and spouse Marianne in his ‘Dwelling Tower’ furnishings
(Picture credit score: Verner Panton Design AG)
That world was not restricted to public commissions. In Basel, the place Panton settled within the Sixties, his Binningen townhouse turned a residing laboratory for his concepts – a home surroundings that doubled as a showroom, blurring day by day life with design experiment.
His daughter, Carin Panton von Halem, has described rising up ‘inside a world of color and creativeness’, in a home that felt like ‘its personal universe… an uncommon panorama of kinds, colors, lights and surprising particulars.’ As a toddler, she recollects, it was ‘the right playground, a spot the place your creativeness might roam freely and the place creativity felt as pure as respiration.’
Loss of life and legacy
(Picture credit score: Verner Panton Design AG)
Panton handed away following a coronary heart assault in 1998, aged 72. By then, he had partly returned to Denmark, having spent a lot of his profession primarily based in Switzerland, and was getting ready to open the primary main retrospective of his work, ‘Verner Panton: Mild and Color,’ at Trapholt Museum in Kolding, Denmark.
Among the Verner Panton furnishings that’s now produced by Vitra
(Picture credit score: Vitra)
It’s maybe the sense of imaginative freedom that greatest defines Panton’s enduring attraction. His work was futuristic, actually, however by no means chilly. It emerged from the postwar many years of optimism and experimentation, however it continues to talk to the current as a result of it gives one thing more and more uncommon. In an period of visible fatigue and algorithmic repetition, his interiors are a reminder that design can nonetheless be mischievous, immersive and unapologetically enjoyable.
Store Verner Panton’s most well-known designs
The Panton chair was the primary polymer chair made in a single piece with a cantilever design. Since its introduction to the market, it has superior via a number of manufacturing phases. Vitra and Verner Panton labored carefully collectively to develop a brand new model made from polypropylene, which was launched in 1999
Verner Panton initially designed the Cone Chair for Kom Igen in 1958, a restaurant in Denmark owned by his father. It triggered a sensation, resulting in manufacturing by Plus-linje and ultimately Vitra.
andtradition
Flowerpot lamp
The Der Spiegel places of work had been punctuated with clusters of Panton’s gleaming Flowerpot lamps. Designed in 1968 and later produced by Louis Poulsen, the lamps are nonetheless in manufacturing right now via &Custom.
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