DesignerFinnish
Eero Aarnio
3 active items
Eero Aarnio was born on 21 July 1932 in Helsinki, Finland. He trained at the Institute of Industrial Arts in Helsinki, where his meticulous admission drawing of a Finnish markka coin caught the attention of Ilmari Tapiovaara, then one of the school's leading figures. That encounter opened the door to a formative apprenticeship in Tapiovaara's office, alongside time working with Antti Nurmesniemi and later at the Asko furniture factory in Lahti. He founded his own design studio in Helsinki in 1962.
The Ball Chair came the following year. Aarnio's intention was to create a room within a room — a hollow fiberglass sphere, cut open on one side and set on a swiveling pedestal base, that wraps around the sitter and muffles outside noise. Asko began producing the chair in limited numbers, but it was its appearance at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1966 that brought it international attention almost overnight. The chair's geometry made it a recurring prop in film and television throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, appearing in contexts ranging from science fiction to corporate boardrooms.
In 1968 Aarnio extended the logic of the Ball Chair to two further objects. The Pastil Chair — a shallow fiberglass shell shaped like an oversized disc, light enough to float — was designed to function indoors or outdoors, on land or water. That same year came the Bubble Chair, which resolved the Ball Chair's one limitation: its opacity. Aarnio wanted light inside the sphere, and found that heated acrylic could be blown into a transparent ball and suspended from the ceiling on a steel cable. Both chairs received the American Industrial Design Award in 1968.
Aarnio continued working across scales and materials over the following decades. The Tomato Chair (1971) stacked three padded spheres into a seat; the Parabel Table combined a fiberglass top with a tulip-influenced pedestal. From the 1990s onward he produced pieces for Magis, including the Trioli (2005), a rotational-moulded polyethylene seat for children that functions as a stool, chair, or rocking toy depending on orientation — a work that earned him the Compasso d'Oro in 2008. He received the Finland Prize from the Finnish Ministry of Education in 2005 and became an honorary member of SIO, the Finnish Association of Interior Designers, in 1999.
Work by Aarnio is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Design Museum Helsinki. In 2016–17 the Swedish Nationalmuseum presented a dedicated exhibition of his work, reflecting the particular resonance his output has in Scandinavia.
At auction, the Ball Chair and Pastil Chair in Asko production — especially first-edition 1960s examples — draw the highest results. On Auctionist, Ball Chairs have sold at up to 27,000 SEK, and first-edition Asko Ball Chairs from the 1960s have reached 18,000 SEK. Pastil Chairs in fiberglass-reinforced plastic regularly sell in the 8,000–11,500 SEK range, while lounge groups combining a Pastil chair with the Kantarell table have achieved 15,200 EUR. The top auction houses for his work in the Nordic market are Stockholms Auktionsverk, Hagelstam, and Hälsinglands Auktionsverk.