Color And Light

Metropolis breaks down the spectrum, revealing how designers grapple with light across scales and typologies.

Transparency

The iconic clear and colored glassworks of Timo Sarpaneva still feel fresh today.

By Tiffany Lambert

For over half a century, until his death in 2006, Finnish artist and designer Timo Sarpaneva exerted a significant influence on Scandinavian design. Marrying the functional and the fanciful, he enthusiastically engaged with such diverse media as cast iron, textiles, and graphics, but was most highly regarded for his glass pieces, which are defined by their sculptural grace and textured or colored surfaces.

Born into a family of blacksmiths, Sarpaneva trained as a graphic designer at the Central School of Industrial Design (later the University of Arts and Design, now a part of Aalto University) but shifted his focus after graduating. His first forays into glassmaking are summed up by his odd but daring glass art object of 1949, a thick, truncated stalk, blossoming at the top, rendered in clear and green glass. This early piece suggests the budding growth of organicism and offers glimpses of the unbridled experimentation in the future.

At just 24, Sarpaneva was hired by Iittala, the iconic Finnish glass manufacturer. Among his first designs for the company was Devil’s Churn (1951), an abstract collection in which supple biomorphic forms were gently incised with perforations, made by cutting through molten glass with scissors. In subsequent works he adapted the steam-blown technique by using wet wooden branches (mostly fallen from apple trees) to produce pockets of air inside the still-hot glass; the results of this unorthodox method are best demonstrated by his clear-glass vases, such as Lansetti II (Lancet II) and Kajakki (Kayak), which were awarded the Grand Prix at the 1954 Milan Triennale. By employing techniques typically reserved for the production of sculpture, Sarpaneva blurred distinctions between art glass and glass for everyday use.