Yrjö Kukkapuro lived his time up to the end

Decorator and the designer Yrjö Kukkapuro Died on February 8th in a long -term illness at home in Kauniainen. Kukkapuro was 91 years old, born on April 6, 1933 in the village of Aution in the Vyborg rural municipality.

The Kukkapuro family had moved to Imatra in 1938, and from there, at the age of 21, he went to study at the Ateneum in 1954. At the Ateneum, Yrjö Kukkapuro also met his wife, an art graphic artist Irmel. They lived and worked together for decades in their studio house in Kauniainen, completed in the 1960s. The designer pair constantly inspired each other.

Yrjö Kukkapuro graduated as an interior architect but is known as a furniture designer. Millions of people have been sitting in his furniture and 250,000 metro travelers daily see or experience the wooden chairs he has designed for metro stations.

First success There was a 1958 modern chair, which, according to the designer’s calculations, has sold millions of songs.

A spectacular start of an international career came in 1965 at the Carousel Chair presented at the Cologne Furniture Fair. The chair was spotted by, among other things, the “father” of the Italian modern design Gio Ponti. Fiberglass carousel is one of the most internationally known Finnish design items. It was born at a time that was dominated by the faith of the future and the spacesopies. The plastic became a popular furniture material.

Kukkapuro wanted to design an ergonomic chair that follows the human body and worked in the form of using a canal network and gypsum. Kukkapuro’s daughter Isa kukkapuro-enbom Remember how the floor of the Töölölö house was covered with plaster dust for a long time as his father grinded and sanded.

The use of plastic was interrupted by the 1970s oil crisis, and the flower puro was transferred to the birch plywood.

In a flowerpuro It was a special designer that he followed his production in his production for decades and was often ahead of it. He went through the flow of design from the modernism of the 1950s to the 1990s of ecology ideas, when he began to try, among other things, alder as a furniture material.

In the early 2000s, the retro boum also brought a more topical carousel that began to be sold at the same pace as in the early days of the chair. The chair is still in production.

Yrjö Kukkapuro was a few Finnish furniture designers who were enthusiastic about postmodernist flows in the early 1980s. The prototypes of the Experiment collection presented in Milan were spectacularly in the international press.

The worldwide significance of Kukkapuro is also illustrated by the fact that his production is in the collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and the Albert Museum of London and Vitra.

To the international The groove also accommodated minor setbacks. The Milan Triennials were important design sites in design in the 1950s and 1960s. Kukkapuro was chosen to design the department for the 1968 Triennial, which lived in Europe’s “crazy year”.

Students organized extensive demonstrations and also spread to Milan. The triennial exhibition was already closed on the opening day as the students took over the place. They found the event elitist. Later, Kukkapuro regretted that he had compiled the Finnish department of everyday items, such as fabrics and boilers. It was not about elitism.

With student radicalism, Kukkapuro also had to deal with the principal of the University of Art and Design Helsinki from 1978 to 1980, when the school was dominated by a battle thinking. Radical students also wrote death threats.

Florist In his own design, he always sought to simplify. Also because industrial products need to be simple to manufacture.

The mind remained refreshed until the last. A chairman was planned in Kukkapuro, which would have become his most minimalist chair in his career.

“He would have liked to make a chair that is breathless that one is just floating on it,” says Isa Kukkapuro-Enbom.

I interviewed the flower stream several times over the years, and he always exudes the enthusiasm and playfulness of the planning. He was enthusiastic about the principles of design.

Florist There were many experiments in the career. For example, he made a graphic artist Tapani Aartoma With a small series of “tattooed” chairs with Aartomaa designing graphic patterns. In China, he became enthusiastic about making bamboo furniture.

The experiments were a good counterweight to the “harsh” of everyday work.

Florist Made a career in China, which is less known in Finland. It is not exaggerated to say that he is China’s most famous Finnish designer. His furniture is manufactured there by Aväte Shanghai Furniture.

In Finland, Kukkapuro was known as enthusiastically as a story -telling but modest person, but in China, he enjoyed the fact that the work was brought up in a spectacular and generous manner.

Kukkapuro taught at universities in China and was selected as an honorary professor of two universities.

He designed a local furniture association office in South China’s “Silicon Valley”. The house still has the Yrjö Kukkapuro Museum, which has a comprehensive production.

This year, this year’s career as a flowerpuro is prominently highlighted in China. Book made by Isa Kukkapuro-Enbom from her father Blue door Published in Chinese, and a comprehensive tour exhibition of several cities is planned.