Artek: Kiki collection

Finnish company Artek's presence at the Salone Del Mobile 2012 will focus on the latest addition to the Tapiovaara design series, the Kiki collection, a re-edition of the range that won the gold prize at Milan's 1960 Triennale.

Kiki represents the timeless and elegant style of Ilmari Tapiovaara, the furniture designer and interior architect who was already setting his sights on the international scene in his twenties. A designer who was influenced by the philosophies of Alvar Aalto and Nils Gustav Hahl, Tapiovaara ascribed to the view that the designer's task is to create a human environment rich with spirituality.

Tapiovaara wanted to design inexpensive furniture for a broader audience and thus made use of materials, such as solid birch, that were readily available in his native Finland in the 1940s. Later in the 1950s, he began to develop multipurpose chairs made of steel tubing and plywood. Tapiovaara designed Kiki in 1960, originally conceiving it as a chair whose stackability was a key feature, allowing it to seat large groups and thus making it ideal for auditoriums. In the Kiki series Tapiovaara employed a more clean cut design idiom instead of the more organic style he had favoured previously, adapting oval steel tubing as the structural and unifying element of the whole collection.

Kiki's timeless and elegant design idiom has made it one of the most popular pieces of public furniture in Finland and the re-edition of the range is comprised of chairs, tables, lounge chairs, benches and sofas.