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SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER | MEETS | NORM ARCHITECTS
“Scandinavian design became this big thing in the
Fifties, and while the balance of power has shifted
back to countries such as the Netherlands, it’s back
on the upswing, especially since the global financial
crisis in 2008,” Bjerre-Poulsen says.
The last boom in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
design around the turn of the century had a completely
different character. It was design in the form
of art, interrogating and investigative. In the firing
line were the aesthetics on which Norm Architects is
building its business.
“Design that’s experimental, playful, and driven
by fashion is absolutely fine for galleries and art
exhi bitions, but design for mass production has to
be timeless, it has to meet a need, and it has to be
high quality in every way,” Bjerre-Poulsen says.
“It has to stand the test of time. You should be
able to look at it in 10, 20 years’ time and still find it
useful and beautiful.”
An agency name like Norm Architects
probably wouldn’t have gone down
as well at a time when designers and
artists were interpreting their task as the
dissection of modernism and turning
the principles “less is more” and “form follows
function” on their heads.
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Like a small village with minimalist
houses, The Village is a showroom
for Danish designers &tradition,
situated in an old warehouse at
Paper Island, Copenhagen
DECEMBER 2014 | SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER