Noritsugu Oda is a professor in the arts and crafts department of Hokkaido University in Japan. Formerly an illustrator, he has won 26 awards in the field of advertising.
Reviews from: THE MODERNISM MAGAZINE I.D. MAGAZINE by Cara
Greenberg
The greatest revelation of Danish Chairs by Noritsugu Oda is that
Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner were only the tip of the iceberg.
Great Danes in chair design were many and this book includes
unfamiliar names like Helge Vestergaard Jensen, designer of an
extraordinary 1955 nylon-cord "racket" chair, and Edvard and Tove
Kindt-Larsen, prolific in Denmark from the 1930s through '50s, but
unknown in the U.S.; variants on familiar designs, like Poul
Kjaerhom's easy chair of 1971, a wooden-legged version of this more
common steel-and-leather designs; and rarely-seen pieces by
well-known designers such as Finn Juhl's extravagantly shaped
pelican chair of 1940. A preface by Takako Murakami, elegantly
translated from the Japanese, goes a long way toward explaining how
the Japanese bring such a fresh and clear eye to the subject of
chairs. Their fascination with the Western furniture form seem only
natural when one considers that the chair made its appearance in
Japan only forty years ago. Oda, a professor of arts and crafts at
Hokkaido University, documents the spare perfection of Danish chair
design from the early twentieth century to the present decade in
uniformly lit. 360-degree views of some 200 chairs, accompanied by
the author's schematic line drawings. Why the Danes? Denmark in the
twentieth century possessed all the necessary conditions for the
development of excellence in furniture design, argues Murakami: "a
far-reaching understanding of traditional woodworking and modern
engineering techniques, the presence of highly trained
craftspeople...the unparalleled creativity of its designers and
their recognition of consumer's needs and desires." On perusing
Danish Chairs, we can only marvel at a small nation's consistency
in producing cultural artifacts of such exceptional craftsmanship,
beauty, and utility. by Jonah Brucker-Cohen
There's no mistaking the look of an early modern Danish chair:
strong but spare architecture with elegant, organic curves.
Mid-century Danish designers felt a moral obligation to improve the
quality of the consumer's life, and they did so through
uncompromising craftsmanship. With diagrams and photos (most in
black-and-white, but some in color), Oda gives a full 360-degree
view of each chair, brief but often fascinating descriptions and a
concise bio of every innovator whose work is included. The author's
passion for the material is obvious: It took him 12 years to take
all the photos for this book, and the better part of a lifetime to
collect the chairs.
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