What’s next for Artek? Formafantasma explores a sustainable revolution for the Finnish brand

Over the past three years, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Milanese studio Formafantasma have infiltrated Artek, the Finnish company known for its reissues of Alvar Aalto designs as well as contemporary works. The project comes as a result of Cambio, the pair’s 2020 exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery exploring the governance of the extraction of timber from forests.

Marianne Goebl, managing director at Artek, describes the collaboration with Formafantasma as ‘a dialogue’, which started as a research project and resulted in a new iteration of Cambio shown at Designmuseo in Helsinki in 2022.

Now, the designers unveil the latest chapter of this creative conversation, a collection developed around ‘Stool 60’, among Alvar Aalto’s most iconic designs originally created in 1933 and still among the company’s most beloved and popular pieces. 

What makes this collection a turning point for Artek is not only that it’s made entirely of wild birch, a type of wood that is local to the company and widely abundant, but it also lets the wood be, allowing its natural chromatic fluctuations, knots and trails to remain visible instead of being edited out. 

The making of Artek’s ‘Stool 60’ by Alvar Aalto

‘Formafantasma proposed an array of concrete and speculative measures for Artek to be a “forest company” as much as a “design company”, taking our intrinsic connection to the Finnish forest to a next level,’ says Goebl, for whom learning more about local forests as a company was a key element of the collaboration.

‘Artek is intrinsically connected to the Finnish forest. More than 80 per cent of Artek furniture, including “Stool 60”, is made from birch trees grown, felled, and seasoned in Central Finland,’ she continues. ‘The birch wood originates mainly from mixed forests within a 250km radius of the sawmill, where it is cut into planks. The timber is then transported to Artek’s factory near Turku, where it is slowly air-dried. After a careful wood selection process, modern production methods are combined with skillful handcrafting to manufacture Artek furniture, still based on Alvar Aalto’s pioneering methods for bending solid wood.‘

A natural result of the company’s refinement of its designs is the elimination of any natural marks from the wood – a market-conforming selection criterion challenged by Formafantasma through the collaboration. ‘We finally developed a new wood selection – we call it “wild birch” – that systematically embraces the honest beauty of the forest,’ adds Goebl. ‘It celebrates the quality of imperfection, in which natural marks are proudly shown, making every product unique. As a result, we actually propose a new aesthetic: an aesthetic of sustainability.’

Artek’s ‘Stool 60 Villi’ by Formafantasma

‘Artek is a fantastic example of a very iconic company that is representative of design, that has something that no other company has, which is the relationship with an ecosystem, with a biome,’ says Farresin. ‘And what we did was basically to make the selection of wood much more inclusive: it's a very small chain change, but it is a fundamental one because it will result in cutting fewer trees, which will have a dramatic impact on the company.’

Parts of the design also tell a wider story: ‘those insect trails, they are because the insects started to colonise trees in Finland as a result of climate change,’ explains Farresin. ‘So, for us, accepting those trees, is also a way of accepting the reality of the forest today.’

‘Stool 60 Villi’ maintains Aalto’s original design while quietly suggesting a revolutionary approach for Artek. In addition to the stool, which bears the natural signs of the wood, Trimarchi and Farresin created a further four designs - dubbed ‘Bark’, ‘Core’, ‘Knot’ and ‘Trail’ – each focusing on a specific feature of the wood. 

Goebl and the designers stress that ‘Stool 60’ is only the starting point of what they hope will expand to their wider catalogue while educating their customer base and developing further, more radical strategies for Artek to become ‘a forest-centric’ company.

The collaboration also takes Artek back to its origins, as Farresin explains. ‘The original pieces by Aalto were imperfect, they had these natural features of trees, we somehow basically reintroduced this. This idea of perfection is not realistic when we talk about products made of natural materials.’

‘Ultimately we want to contribute to a systemic change in the furniture industry,’ concludes Goebl.’We hope that in a few years, wood with natural marks will just be a standard throughout. Ideally, at Artek, we will then again have just one wood selection, which includes all the variety the forest has to offer.’

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A version of this article appears in the October 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, on sale now available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today