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Claesson Koivisto Rune
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In 1995, three graduates of the University College of Arts in Stockholm, Mårten Claesson (b. 1970), Eero Koivisto (b. 1958), and Ola Rune (b. 1963), pooled their training in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and New York to open a practice that refuses to sit still within a single discipline. What began as an architecture office has grown into one of Sweden's most prolific and internationally distributed design studios, with commissions spanning cultural buildings, luxury hotels, furniture collections, lighting, glassware, and textiles.
The trio's formative experiences in Japan, each visiting separately on student scholarships in the early 1990s, left a lasting mark on their approach to form. They absorbed an aesthetic grounded in restraint, craft, and the considered use of natural materials, weaving it together with Italian modernism and American minimalist abstraction into something distinctly their own. The result is work that strips away ornament without feeling cold, and that finds its resolution at the point where function and material coincide.
Their architectural output ranges from the Sfera Building, a culture house in Kyoto clad in a titanium cherry-leaf screen, to the Nobis Hotel in Stockholm and the K5 hotel in Tokyo. The Sfera project was selected for the international section of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, making Claesson Koivisto Rune the first Swedish office to appear there. Buildings on Öland, in Kumla, and in Marfa, Texas, round out a body of work that moves with equal ease between continents and scales.
On the product side, collaborations read like a survey of European and Scandinavian manufacturing: Cappellini, Living Divani, Tacchini, Arflex, Fontana Arte, Kasthall, Muuto, Wästberg, Nikari, and Offecct among them. Pieces such as the Anita armchair and the W151 pendant lamps carry the same clarity of intention found in their buildings. At Swedish auction, their seating and tables appear regularly, with the "Montevideo" armchair and "Brasilia" coffee table among the pieces that circulate through the secondary market.
The studio has accumulated a substantial list of awards, including ten American Good Design Awards between 2009 and 2018, the Red Dot Design Award Best of the Best in 2014 (the first office to hold it across five product categories), and the Bruno Mathsson Award in 2015, the highest recognition in Scandinavian furniture design. Three decades in, Claesson Koivisto Rune operates as a studio in which architecture and design are not separate tracks but continuous expressions of the same underlying inquiry.