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Verner Panton
Biography:
Verner
Panton, born 1926 in Gamtofte, Denmark, studied at Odense Technical
College before enrolling at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in
Copenhagen as an architecture student. He worked from 1950-52 in the
architectural firm of Arne Jacobsen, and founded an independent studio
for architecture and design in 1955. His furniture designs for the firm
Plus-linje attracted attention with their geometric forms. In the
following years Panton created numerous designs for seating furniture
and lighting. His passion for bright colours and geometric patterns
manifested itself in an extensive range of textile designs. By fusing
the elements of a room—floor, walls, ceiling, furnishings, lighting,
textiles, wall panels made of enamel or plastic—into a unified
gesamtkunstwerk, Panton's interior installations have attained
legendary status. The most famous examples are the "Visiona" ship
installations for the Cologne Furniture Fair (1968 and 1970), the
Spiegel publishing headquarters in Hamburg (1969) and the Varna
restaurant in Aarhus (1970). Panton's collaboration with Vitra began in
the early 1960s, when the firm decided to develop what became his
best-known design, the Panton Chair, which was introduced in 1967. This
was also the first independently developed product by Vitra. Verner
Panton died in 1998 in Copenhagen. Vitra's re-edition of designs by
Panton, as well as the retrospective of his work mounted by the Vitra
Design Museum in 2000, bear witness to the special relationship between
Vitra and Verner Panton.
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